Instagram Simplified: Generate Messages for Your Services, Triple Your Views, and Gain 500 Followers a Week with Craig Ballantyne

Ian Garlic: 

Welcome to the Garlic Marketing Show. I’ve got a three-peat guest, our first three-peat guest ever. He’s giving out such great information. I’ve brought him back. And before I introduce our guest just one message from our sponsors:

If you are looking to create the ultimate videos, you need great videographers. You need great video editors. You need people to understand your marketing. Go to storycrews.com to find videographers in your area.

All right. My guest today is the Instagram expert Craig Ballantyne. Thanks for being back on, Craig. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

Hey, thanks so much. I totally forgot. It was round 3. 

 

Ian Garlic:

I know, I know I was thinking about that today. I was like, “Man, 3 episodes!” but it’s always great information, people love it. So I want to see what’s going on. You know last time we talked about your Instagram strategy.

We’ve talked about, some of your courses and your coaching in the past. I know people that have been through your coaching and love it and people that have been in your groups and love it. So tell me a little bit about what’s going on with you right now. What’s working?

 

Craig Ballantyne:

I mean the more things change the more they stay the same.

So the foundations are the same. We’re pushing Instagram. We’re pushing more online coaching. I still do my workshop, still doing my events, I just wrote another book called ‘Unstoppable.’ It became a Wall Street Journal bestseller. 

 

Ian Garlic:

Yeah, we got it right there. [Gestures to the bookshelf behind him.]

 

Craig Ballantyne:

Yeah, cool man, cool. So the fundamentals of what we taught last time are the same but we can dive deep.

It’s really cool what we’re going to do a hands-on over-the-shoulder sort of thing. I’m a little more professional on Instagram in some ways and also surprisingly a whole lot more rudimentary at the same time. 

 

Ian Garlic:

 Interesting. So tell me a little about why you are more rudimentary?

 

Craig Ballantyne:

Well today, for example, in my stories we’re using just plain text. Just plain text slides instead of me doing a video story, and we’re finding that these ones are generating as many, if not more direct messages and coaching clients than a talking head video.

So this is actually been a fascinating thing that I’ve learned. Another guy down in your area guy named Carlos Silva, he’s doing some of these text things. And actually, the idea came from one of my friends, Rob Hanley, who is a consultant in Portugal. He didn’t want to do video and he just started doing these text slides and you just read them really fast.

And as long as you are- So here it is [Ian pulls slides up on screen]. This was done in Canva by my assistant and I didn’t even write this. My editor wrote it with a little bit of direction from me. So these things, they look nice and you can get a little bit of imagery just like how we’re doing this for YouTube with video instead of just us Talking Heads.

I mean now people can get into some polls and stuff. This one worked has worked very well [referencing text slide]. It generates about eight to ten direct messages every time we run it. Notice that I say “every time.” We re-run these things about 4 to 6 weeks if they’re good, and I’m always coming up with new stuff, too.

But you know, there’s just enough on there that somebody can read it in 15 seconds. And here [referencing text slides] you notice we tell them exactly what to say in the direct message so we can qualify them and figure out, “okay, which kind of path are we going to take them on,” and then we hit them with some social proof.

Which is something I’ve always done. We have this next slide it is a video testimonial. So this is from one of our sales pages [referencing Ian’s screen] and people can read it and kind of scrolls up and down. So it’s just another way of doing it. Then I throw in some fun stuff here like a nice good slow-motion video of my dog taking down another dog.

Remember when you played video games when your kid or maybe you didn’t, but I did. You got something that was called an “Easter Egg” in the video game, which is like “Hey, maybe find a hidden code or something.” So after we give them the training we make sure that we reward them with some entertaining stuff of it like a dog takedown.

So that’s how it’s rudimentary but also more professional at the same time. 

 

Ian Garlic:

Yeah, and I always tell people, you know, your two biggest enemies on video are that you’re battling against are babies and puppies. So, you brought your enemy into the fold. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

There you go, man. I call her Daisy The Bark-eting Dog.

She does some bark-eting videos, where she barks and I do marketing. So yeah, I’m always including her as much as I can. Every day there are multiple videos of her doing crazy stuff, but also at the same time using that story selling system that we talked about last time. 

 

Ian Garlic:

That’s awesome. I think that last time we talked about the story selling system, we talked about also your system for getting followers. You weren’t even at 10,000 followers last time, and by the way, if you guys are listening to this make sure to go into the show notes. Click to see the video, because we’re showing his actual Instagram on here. At this time 47,900 followers and only following 15.

That’s pretty impressive. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

Yeah. Yeah, you know, I follow the phrase “Use social media, but don’t let social media be used on you.” So when I go on there and I see a whole bunch of posts from people, I’m like “this is not good. I gotta either unfollow-” or you can mute people’s posts and stories. But the thing is you always see their stories at the top. You won’t see their posts in your feed which helps, but I only follow people that I’m learning from or that don’t post so that’s how you can get a number of 15 and I’m trying to cut it down as much as possible.

I don’t think I can cut it down any further. 

 

Ian Garlic:

Yeah, and this is really cool. So what have you changed? Obviously, you’ve hit a hockey stick right here and it’s funny that your first video, your first story was a hockey stick. What hit the hockey stick on the number of followers.

 

Craig Ballantyne:

I think it’s all been consistency. It’s not like, you know, I’m doing two thousand a week or anything. It’s just a consistent 500 or so week and you know maybe about a hundred a day. The stuff that has helped has just been most of the stuff that I talked about last time. It’s valuable, shareable, purposeful posts.

So when I described the main feed [On Instagram], I use this little analogy of a Louis Vuitton store. So imagine you’re walking down Fifth Avenue in New York City and that’s where all the stores are, and you’re up by the Trump Tower and Central Park, and you walk by the Louis Vuitton store.

In the window of the Louis Vuitton store, as there always is a window for window shopping, they have some really eye-catching stuff and this is the analogy for Instagram your main feed. The main feed has to catch people’s eye. It has to first, elevate your status. Second, manufacture celebrity. Then three, four, and five, It has to be valuable, purposeful, and shareable. 

So those three things valuable, purposeful, and shareable. So if you take a look, and people are looking at the video, let’s look at the five tips for time management one there. Okay, great, great. So this is valuable. It’s purposeful and sharing. [Watch the video at 10:50].

 

The way that I look at every Instagram post that I put up, I think okay, “You know what? I want to be respectful of Ian’s time as he’s scrolling through Instagram. I don’t want to put up something that is just selfish and it’s just for me.” Like me and my friend at a baseball game. That’s not valuable.

It’s not purposeful and it’s not shareable. So it’s a waste of your Instagram space. Here [in reference to his feed] I have a picture of me presenting. And then that’s purposeful and that elevates my status and it moves people into thinking, “Oh, he’s a celebrity or an authority.” It’s valuable content. Even if you didn’t read the description below there’s text in the main post in the picture.

So even if you just looked at the picture and didn’t read anything else below, you didn’t click the dot dot dot, then you would say, “Okay, cool. That was valuable.” Then it’s shareable and according to the people that I know, that know people at Instagram, they say that if your posts get shared a lot and they get saved a lot, those are two of the most important metrics. 

Most of us would probably think “well, it does it get a lot of likes does it get a lot of comments?” According to the people, you know the “them” the “theys”, they say that the shares and saves are more important than the likes and the comments.

So this one gets a lot of shares and saves [referencing post on his Instagram feed]. The formula here is a picture of you in some type of celebrity or authority situation, could be you with somebody else that other people know, could be you at a nice location, could be you teaching, and then valuable content. So either a quote, and it doesn’t have to be your quote it can be somebody else’s quote, that just fits in nicely.

So if you go back to my main thing there, if you scroll down a bit. There is one. I haven’t found it yet go a little bit more. Okay. So there’s one of me with the checkmark shirt on again and my friend behind me. His name is Jason Capital. He has a very large following on Instagram as well of young men and young women, young ambitious millennials. So we’ve got a post where a lot of people will recognize him.

So that will elevate me, plus that shirt is pretty funny, and I’m wearing it right now as well. Then the quote, it’s a Jim Rohn quote. It’s a quote that if you’ve heard before you’re like, “yes, that is so right. Great reminder. Very valuable.” If it’s a quote you’ve never heard before, and actually I was surprised by how many people had never heard it.

It’s like, “Oh my gosh. Yes, so true.” Then we have a very valuable description that my editor writes. I don’t write my Instagram posts anymore. I’m fortunate that I have a couple of people working with me on that. So this one [referencing photo in feed] had much many more likes than normal. So I would say an average post for me gets about a thousand likes and this one had sixteen hundred likes and it got a lot of shares and saves.

So this one seemed to be a very valuable one in terms of engagement. And it got a lot of quotes too. 

 

Ian Garlic:

You know when I found too is and you know, let me know if this follows true with you, that you’ve never really know which one’s going to be the big one. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

That’s a great point. So as I mentioned, I’m not doing most of these posts.

I do a few of them, but not most of them. I’ll look at some and go, “Oh man. I don’t know if I would have posted that,” and then, of course, that’s the one that gets more likes and more shares and more safe. So I’m not even a good judge of what goes on Instagram. So I should just shut up and go back in my corner and you know, let my team do it because they’re really dialed in on it.

So you are right. You don’t know exactly what’s going to hit but as I mentioned before one of the things we’re doing is a little more professional. If you look at the page, you see how there’s kind of a color scheme here where it’s black and kind of that turquoise checkmark bluish sort of thing.

 

Ian Garlic: 

Yeah, definitely. Definitely a theme, and I think that’s important. The fact is you don’t know what contents can be absorbed and if it’s valuable to keep putting it out there. Honestly like I thought everyone knows that Jim Rohn quote and like you said a lot of people don’t.

 

Craig Ballantyne:

Yeah, I’m glad you brought this one up. I was going to ask you to bring it up. This is a good example of what not to post most of the time. [referencing post on his Instagram feed]. People are probably thinking, “but it’s a cute picture of a dog and it’s your mom and it’s you know, it’s personality, you know, it’s showing people your life.” And yes, so I have one of these for every 50 but notice how many likes are on there, 600. Very, very few comments. Most people and this is just the way the world is, they don’t care.

They don’t care about my mom. They don’t care about my dog. They only care about themselves. So if you’re putting a picture of your kids up there once every two or three posts… You just shouldn’t. That stuff goes in the stories for the people that want to see it, but your main page needs to be your Louis Vuitton window. Your Louis Vuitton window, that elevates status and manufacturers celebrity.

So anytime you go to an event. Be that person getting a photo with every single speaker that you can. Okay? Because you’re going to go home and you’re going to use them and it’s going to be valuable and like it or not. I mean, this is why the Lamborghini pictures work. You and I don’t have to like Lamborghini pictures. You and I don’t have to like the premise behind the Lamborghini pictures.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game and you can hate the game, but you gotta play the game. So anything that you can do and I don’t have pictures of Lamborghinis or anything on my page, and it’s still valuable and purposeful. I do have one of a Ferrari in Italy but you know, I was on vacation and then we were driving these things.

Those things work because that is how our brains are wired. Okay, we have a lot of stupid human tricks from procrastination to being obsessed with celebrities, being influenced by people who have fame, and that’s just how we’re wired. You can fight it all you want or you can swim with the tide and get a lot further ahead.

So think about that. The one thing that I do is I tell people, “Hey, even if you’re going to Miami for a weekend. You know like to say you’re driving down Ian to Miami for a weekend. Miami’s got some great stuff. Even if you’re going with your wife, you’ll say hey, honey, grant me 60 minutes here. 60 minutes. We’re going to drop this stuff off. You can get freshened up. I’m going to run out, take 30 pictures, and do 10 videos with this list of all these videos I want to make. You know down by the Waterfront, in front of this restaurant, and then honey, I promise I’m putting the phone away.”

But you have just turned that you know weekend trip into Miami, that trip to Vegas, that convention in San Diego, you’ve turned that first hour into a Content Factory. Then you can go home- and when I live in two places, I have a home here in Toronto, which is where I am right now downtown lots of exciting stuff to film, but I also have a home out in the country in this tiny little town where there’s nothing going on and sometimes I spend a couple of weeks out there.

And all I can do is like whiteboard videos and people are sick of whiteboard videos about a minute into the first whiteboard video. So I need to kind of like stockpile all of this cool stuff so I can use when I’m home in my little Podunk town, you know. And that’s the mindset you have to take.

So, you know, ask your partner. Say, “Hey, listen, give me 30 minutes, 60 Minutes to make some videos and then I’ll put the camera away for the for the rest of the weekend, but this will be very valuable and you can write the trip off and all that good stuff.” So that’s the mindset. 

Then in addition to you don’t just go, “oh now I got to make all these videos.” You should have a very clear plan of “Okay, what are my people going to be really interested by? What are the messages that I can tie into?” Being down at the waterfront like “hey, you know what, you see the surf coming in, you know, the waves are crashing against you that’s you know, you sometimes you gotta fight against that, and that’s inertia, that procrastination, but hey, listen blah blah blah and then it ties into a call to action sort of stuff.”

So, if you can make the most out of these trips and end up with so much content, even if you spend 360 days a year and your tiny little town in the middle of nowhere, those five days that you spend in big cities can give you a hundred pieces of content that you can repurpose.

 

Ian Garlic:

Awesome. I mean that’s crazy valuable advice. Especially, just writing off. I mean you save 30% on your vacation. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

Yeah. I’m not an accountant. I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn last night, but by all means I that’s what I’ve been doing and here I am not in jail. 

 

Ian Garlic:

That’s what your friends have been doing.

 

Craig Ballantyne: 

Yeah, so you brought up another slide here [referencing text slide from his Instagram account]. This has been an interesting one in that, this is one where I do not expect anyone to like this post. But this is what I tell people to do is on your main feed, once per week, you have to tell people how they can do business with you, but we still try and follow that valuable, purposeful, and shareable rule.

So if somebody looks at this, it’s still valuable to them if they read the one side with the quote, “don’t just dream about success get up and make it happen.” A lot of people will still be like, “yeah, you know what I got to take more action, you know, I’ve been screwing around today,” so it’s valuable. But it’s purposeful to me in that it tells people about my business growth workshops, and I want to advertise this once per week. We tried all sorts of things. We’ve tried doing pictures with calendars on the next, that didn’t work very well. 

We’ve tried it where it’s just a picture of me and then the dates and that works okay. We just want to be very blunt. It’s like running a commercial. “Here’s what I do. Here’s how you can do business with me” because if you don’t do this, people will go and they’ll follow you for like three years and then maybe they’ll meet you one day and say well, what do you actually do? 

And you know, it’s like having a sponsor at the start of your podcast. We know we’re doing all of this stuff for a reason and every time I post this I get a couple of very serious inquiries about my stuff, and all I have to do is sell one workshop for seven and a half grand and it’s a valuable post to me, you know, it’s and it’s valuable in terms of the content.

It’s not shareable. So it does not check all the boxes. It’s not really elevating my status too much except for the fact that you know, maybe wow he’s all over the place here. That kind of elevates status. So it’s not exactly according to the formula but it’s that one blunt post that we put in every week.

So if you’re a videographer it’s like, “Hey, we just made this film and if you want to film like it, you know, send me a direct message,” and then you can play the film or something like that. Just like, “Hey, we just got two new openings for filming.” You just bluntly post that and realize no one’s going to like it and then the next post is going to be crazy value. 

So that’s what you need to do once in a while. Otherwise, what I realized was, I was only selling in my stories but 10 or 20 percent of people watch my stories. So I’m ignoring 80% of the people, so started doing this and it became very valuable to us. 

 

Ian Garlic:

Let’s talk real quick about the workshops because I know people have gone to them. Yes, do a little promotion for the workshops because I know they’re valuable. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

Yeah certainly. So it’s like an upside-down triangle and it is a high vision of your business. Vision Values because your values and vision drive every decision, We start with that first. Then it’s business strategy all the way down to here’s exactly what you’re going to do next in your business in the next 90 days to grow faster.

There are five or six people in the room, so it’s very personalized and customized and then the people leave this with a year of coaching with me to follow up. So it’s not just one day’s thing. And it’s marketing, sales, connections. You know, that’s one of the things that I’ve always put a lot of emphasis on and I’m proud of what I’ve done is I’ve cultivated a huge network of people so I can connect somebody to a developer to somebody who can sell their products and make some very valuable connections.

So it’s hard to describe. It’s great to experience and you know, somebody just wants more information on it to help them grow their business. Usually, it’s somebody comes in doing 250,000 to 500,000 and wants to grow to a million or a million and wants to grow to five. So they can send me a direct message if they want more information. 

 

Ian Garlic:

Awesome. Yeah, I’ve heard from people how great it is and getting focused and having action steps. Definitely worth it if you want to scale up and build a business. Obviously, Craig’s done it several times. I’m not going to go into his whole background. You can go to the first episode he was on and hear about how successful he’s been but obviously, these things are working.

So I want to step back, you’re talking about 100 to 500 followers a day. I want to talk about that, but before we talk about that, I want to talk about the content that you’re developing. I’ve seen on LinkedIn you’ve talked about your content strategy.

How do you decide what content to even start with? 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

So, we really need to think about who are we trying to attract? Right? Yeah, it’s very similar to your email marketing strategy. I mean a lot of my Instagram strategy is just email marketing for Instagram. So if you think about followers as being your email list and your stories as being your emails as we talked about last time.

It’s like, “Okay, Well if these are the people I want to attract into my coaching programs, in my workshops, I need to make content for them. I need to make content for the small business entrepreneur who wants to be better with their time. Who wants to be reminded of these great quotes. Who needs to listen to my podcast. Who needs to you know, I got a couple of IG TV videos, they’re about time journaling which is incredibly valuable little exercise.

And then we have some videos from my masterminds where I’m teaching Instagram strategies. So there’s a lot of value in the content that we put up there and I’ve got yeah, so there it is [referencing post on his Instagram]. You know, for example, here’s the mindset that I took with these two videos. So I had a camera crew with me and I had two guys, one guy is on a regular camera and another guy’s got my iPhone on the tripod, and I filmed two videos for an email customer series, but also to go on these Instagram TV videos. 

Then I had the editor take the two videos and put them together for a 10-minute video that will go on YouTube because you want to have a longer video on YouTube because YouTube rewards the amount of time spent in your videos. 

So when you make something think about how you can make the most of it. How can you get maximum, maximum leverage from doing something once? So I got three pieces of content from this. One that went up to the email list of people that have bought my book. Two it went on Instagram TV, and I only post video on my Instagram now that goes on Instagram TV.

Because Instagram is pushing out Instagram TV a lot harder than one-minute videos. So you’ll actually get a ton more views like three to five times more views. So we’re putting a lot of Instagram TV videos up because for the longest time Instagram TV was useless. I just accidentally one day when I was in Florida for some reason, I put an Instagram TV video up and I’m like, “What’s going on here? Well like did Instagram break I have 5,000 views of this video in 24 hours and normally video on my main feed gets about 2,000 – 2,500.” 

I didn’t understand what was going on and then I started doing it again and it was repeating. I look like an idiot in the video there [referencing video on his feed]. Then and then so I started doing it repeatedly, and all my Instagram TV videos get far more views than you see some of these other videos that are just regular one-minute videos.

You probably getting double the views. Is this one was good [referencing video post on instagram]. So 2,600 views of this one is pretty good though. The empire one probably has 1,600 views and that’s a clip from our Empire podcast with me from our hundred show on our podcast there. 

Yeah, the one-minute videos just don’t get a lot of traction on Instagram. 

 

Ian Garlic:

Really, that’s interesting you know, because everyone thinks that that’s the ideal length, but there you go. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

So now I haven’t proven this but my theory is this, what you want to do is make Instagram TV videos. They don’t have to be really long. They just have to be longer than a minute because if we believe the theory that Instagram TV- we just put this one up like an hour ago [referencing Instagram post].

So it doesn’t have a lot of videos and it’s a podcast one. 

 

Ian Garlic:

You have 334 views in an hour. That’s not too bad. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

Yeah, so hopefully it is the first time we’ve ever done for longer than a minute video for our podcast. Usually, put up a podcast clip that’s just a minute and it usually gets like a thousand views over 24 hours.

So I thought, “Alright if Instagram TV really gets more just distribution, why don’t we make a longer video and put it up on Instagram TV instead of putting a main video on Instagram?” And so far looks like I’m right. Now, the problem is that it’s really hard to format it properly because if you look at the preview on my main feed, you don’t see the caption the closed captioning at the bottom. So all you see is my giant face. 

 

Ian Galic:

Yeah, I see what you’re saying. 

 

Craig Ballantyne: 

You have to actually open it up, but you know back to the Instagram stuff. So when you’re making your Instagram TV video, my theory is this because I’ve looked at the drop-off, 10 percent of people actually click through from the preview and go and watch it on Instagram TV.

If you have a 10-minute video on Instagram TV, nobody’s actually watching it. The first minute of your Instagram TV videos is where you have to have the most important content and I will put my call to action in about 40 seconds into an Instagram TV video because a lot of people will watch that.

They won’t watch it if it’s at the end of a 3-minute Instagram TV video. So I think all you would have to do is make a 70-second video because that will go on Instagram TV and allow you to do a preview. So when you’re uploading it to Instagram TV, there’s a radio button that says, “Show Preview On. Main Profile” and you say yes. So that gets it up there. 

It gets greater distribution. If you have your call-to-action halfway through that first minute or 40 seconds in, a lot of people will see it and if you tell them to comment or send you a direct message you’ve kind of gamed the system in order to get more people to see it as opposed to just putting up a regular one minute video.

 

Ian Garlic:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You game the system, but it’s also about I think- 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

It’s helping Instagram. Instagram likes it. Yeah, but you get your message heard by more people. I looked, like when you go in your insights, you can see the drop off of somebody watching an Instagram TV video.

It’s like a cliff. You know, like people watch 10 seconds and 20 seconds. Hardly anybody is watching 30 seconds. But then once you get to like that minute like five percent of people actually watch past a minute, so you’ve got to get what you were trying to say in that first minute. 

 

Ian Garlic:

Yeah and not burying the headline. I see that so much in videos or people, you know, they’re trying to make this Grand Finale and it’s like no one’s ever getting to your grand finale. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

That’s unfortunate but true. 

 

Ian Garlic:

Yeah, and you have to know the medium. You have to know your viewer, and you have to understand the medium. Everyone’s on their phone doing something else. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

Everyone’s on the phone and in the bathroom, that’s where they are.

 

Ian Garlic:

Yeah on the front of the bathroom or like at Fort Wayne Airport. You know, like my wife on the phone while we’re sitting around together. I’m like, why don’t you post something? So this is absolutely incredible. Thank you. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

Haven’t finished the Louis Vuitton store analogy. So make sure I do that before the end. 

 

Ian Garlic:

Okay before then, Louis Vuitton, let’s talk about followers that 100-500 a day. What are you doing? That’s amazing. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

It’s the same stuff I was always doing it’s just so it’s valuable, purposeful, shareable content. So that people share it. If people share it, then they’ll see your Instagram handle when it’s shared and it’s essentially the Instagram version of affiliate marketing.

So when I used to do affiliate marketing for my fitness programs back in the day, if my friend Joel Marion sends an email out and says go buy Craig’s program. More people will buy it than if I sent an email to Joel’s list and said, “Hey, go buy my program. You don’t know me,” right? It’s a warm introduction.

So now on Instagram, what you want to do is get people who have followings to tell they’re following to go and follow you there’s a couple of ways to do it one is simply reposting and two is you know for me to be on your podcast Ian you’ll post it on your page and say, “Hey, Craig Ballantyne was on the podcast. Here’s his Instagram.”

 

Ian Garlic:

I do it a lot and we were talking about it, I get tons of comments.

 

Craig Ballantyne:

So I will get followers from you when you post that on yours, and it’s the same as being at the event getting pictures with people. You know, so let’s say, for example, I was at an event with Jesse Itzler, you know, a very famous guy. Got a picture with him, posted it in my stories, tagged him. He reposted it. 

Now, you might get ten followers from that. I maybe got a hundred one-time, Grant Cardone put me in his stories. You’re not going to get a million followers from one of these, but you’re going to get a bunch of followers every time. And then the more that you just grow then it becomes like this perpetual cycle.

Right? As your following grows, you become more famous, more people want to repost you, and talk about you and talk about your book. And it becomes easier. So it’s a little bit of a catch-22, but you have to. If you’re all in on Instagram and I was all-in from day one, then you need to do it.

Now, you can also leverage everything else that you have. You can go to your Facebook page and say, “Hey go follow me on Instagram.” You can go to Twitter. You can go to your email list, “Go follow me on Instagram,” and you can kind of pad your stats a little bit if you have some other assets there. But if you have that scratch with nothing, then you just have to take that valuable, purposeful, shareable approach. Some people say you can go and buy shoutouts, where you can go and buy shoutouts, but I’ve just talked about the free ways of getting shout outs from better followings. 

 

Ian Garlic:

Yep. I mean it’s it makes a lot of sense and you know, it’s work, but obviously, it’s paying off. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

Yeah, it’s working. It’s a lot slower than most people want it to be. You don’t need 48 thousand followers to make a bunch of money on Instagram.

 

I mean, I was making my first bunch of money when I had less than 500 followers. 

 

Ian Garlic:

So there you go. And yeah, it’s the true fans. So many people concentrate on that follower number. It’s the engagement and if you’re talking to the right person. Most of the people listening to this, if you got one of the right people to watch your Instagram every day and convert you’d be making a ton of money.

 

Craig Ballantyne:

Yes. Yeah, it’s really like, it’s business media. I’m using Instagram to make money 

 

Ian Garlic:

And inspire people to be purposeful, etc. So let’s finish up the Louis Vuitton story. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

Yeah. When you’re walking down the street if there’s nothing good in the window, you’re not going to stop and look into the window.

So the store has not done its job. Very much like your Instagram feed, if there’s nothing valuable purpose, or shareable there and somebody happens to land on your profile. They’re going to go, “Ehh no,” and if people don’t stop on your pictures, if they do follow you and they’re scrolling through and they never stopped on your pictures, Instagram stops showing your pictures to anybody anyways.

So you need to have that window shopping, window dressing. The purpose of the window shopping at Louis Vuitton is to get you into the store because that’s where the sale is made. You know, Louis Vuitton does not have sidewalk sales. So you gotta get them in the store and it’s the same with our Instagram.

We need to have a good window in order to get people into the stories which is where the sales are made. So now your Instagram stories are like the inside of a Louis Vuitton store where they can see all the stuff that you have and you can make the pitch, you can make the call to action, and that’s where the transaction happens.

So that’s the analogy and I think it simplifies Instagram for somebody who doesn’t know anything about it. Who thinks like how the heck does this work? It’s just, make yourself look good on the front page and then deliver good content on the front page too. 

But then explain what you do, how people can do business with you, and tell them exactly how to, whether it’s sending you a direct message or if you have the swipe up feature, whatever it is or drop a comment or go and find the phone number in your bio.

Whatever it is to get them to take the next step, and then move them head towards doing business.

 

Ian Garlic: 

Love it. That’s fantastic. And you know, another analogy I always make when you’re talking about high-end stores and I think that it falls into here too, but like you go walking in Miami. Any of the major streets where all the big shops are, and you walk into a shop, and if there are six things for sale on the wall, you know it’s going to be expensive. I think that that’s a good point too is because you’re not trying to sell 20,000 different things here. You’ve got your event and your system, right? And that’s it. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

Yeah pretty much exactly. So it’s very focused.

 

Ian Garlic:

It’s very, very focused very clean, consistent. And I love it. It’s a really good looking one, definitely eye-catching across the board. So awesome. Well, you know Craig, I know you got to go soon any last-minute tips for people if they’re getting on Instagram? Anything that you would suggest last minute? 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

You’ve got to be consistent. Be consistent but don’t force something. Put up valuable, purposeful, shareable content. Go back even before you do that and think, “well, who am I trying to do this messaging for and what would they find valuable? What would they share and how could I make it purposeful to moving them ahead towards doing business with me and ultimately what do I want them to do in terms of doing business with me?”

So when all of that is in place and it all works, it doesn’t matter if the message is coming through video or text or whatever. It’s the right message to market-match and you if you got the right list, you can make a lot of mistakes and still make a lot of money. 

 

Ian Garlic:

That’s great advice. You know, I lied. One last thing I want to talk about, it’s your book. Yeah, because I’ve got a copy here. Thank you very much. It’s fantastic and it’s obviously super valuable. Tell me a little bit about it, who should be reading it, and where they can get it. Obviously, Amazon. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

It’s a workshop in a book. So some of the workshops are in the book. It also really helps people overcome entrepreneurial anxiety, get a lot of clutter out of their head and develop clarity for where to go next. It has some of the exercises so that you understand what really matters to you, so you can build a plan that eliminates the crap and helps you achieve exactly what you want. So you can go to beunstoppablebook.com.

We have our free plus shipping offer there, but you go to Amazon get the audiobook, I’m very, very proud of. It’s just absolutely awesome to listen to if I do say so myself. So either way, grab it. Got it on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. A lot of people have had incredible breakthroughs with it.

Then there’s also some stuff because it’s also written around my story of overcoming anxiety. So there will be some actual, additional information in there about physical changes to make, some techniques, some exercises mental and physical that you can do to get rid of what I call,  entrepreneurial anxiety, that so many people like you and I and have to deal with because we have stress and distractions and so many opportunities. You can actually have too many good things going on in your life that can cause a little bit of anxiety and stress. So it’ll be very helpful to any entrepreneur a hundred percent. 

Especially those that have had any stress or struggle or panic in their life. 

 

Ian Garlic:

[Laughs] Just just a few of them. And if you haven’t had an in that stuff in your life, you haven’t been on a real entrepreneur long enough.

Craig Ballantyne, this has been awesome. Check out social story selling system.com get the book. All the links will be in the show notes. If you’re listening to this go over to the show notes watch the video. You can see everything we’re talking about and obviously follow him on Instagram tons of content. Craig. Thanks so much for being on the show. 

 

Craig Ballantyne:

Hey, I’m gonna have to go and learn a whole bunch more stuff about Instagram so I can come back and forth time now he pumped they have for Pete. 

 

Ian Garlic:

Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you all for listening to the Garlic Marketing Show is denying garlic and Craig Ballantyne.

Thank you so much for taking us on your journey. 

 

Ian Garlic:

Video, you know it makes you an authority. You know it will get you more leads, better leads that close faster and spend more with you. Video stories will help you be remembered and connect with those perfect clients. The problem is where do you start? storycrews.com is the place to go. It’s like a film crew with an ‘s’. 

What’s your strategy? Do you do it yourself? Do you hire videographer an agency? Do you need an editor? How do you know if they really know your business and how to make videos for business that work? The answer to all this and more can be found at storycrews.com/garlic.

It is the place to find the latest video marketing strategies the best gear for your business, as well as videographers editors and agencies near you that are into video storytelling for business. Go to storycrews.com/garlic to get special insider info for listeners of the Garlic Marketing Show, including special access to several of my courses, including my case story course. Go to storycrews.com/garlic to get a whole bunch of special offers just for listeners of the Garlic Marketing Show. 

Whether you’re looking for a videographer or to do it yourself go to storycrews.com/garlic to get started today.