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Sue B Zimmerman: How Businesses Use Instagram To Grow Sales

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Wes Schaeffer
September 07, 2017

Watch your teenagers to determine where to market your business next

Stream below or right-click here to download the episode. 

  • Has started 18 businesses

  • Market, promote, amplify

  • Used to sell polliwogs as a young girl

  • Was teaching social media locally

  • Applied it to her retail business

  • Tried everything…including FourSquare and Animoto

  • Her teenage twin daughters told her about Instagram (follow the leads of your kids to see what is the next hot trend)

  • This was around 2012, and her retail sales blew up (jewelry, etc, in an affluent seasonal resort)

  • Loves teaching

  • Used to teach Pinterest, which is primarily a bookmarking site that creates backlinks

  • You don’t share selfies on Pinterest

  • Instagram is more of an emotional pull and connection

  • Put your YouTube videos on Pinterest because the backlinks are so valuable

  • Instagram is your digital magazine

    • There’s a promise on the cover of a magazine

    • You buy the magazine to benefit from the promise on the cover

  • Stay in your lane, your niche on Instagram, which is why she has a business, a personal, and a team account on Instagram

  • Each serves a different purpose

  • The description of your photo—2,200 characters—doesn’t have to match the image. Make it a micro-blog like her “The Instagram Expert“

  • Go deeper

  • The theory / philosophy of creating an effective funnel on Instagram

    • Match your business name to you

    • Have a good photo

    • Have a good logo

    • Have a good bio in a creative way, i.e. not your LinkedIn bio

    • A good URL with a good Call To Action

    • Not spammy or salessy

    • Provide value: inform, inspire, entertain

    • Nurture your leads, and you can eventually close big deals that started from your Instagram account

    • Sue B Zimmerman nurtures her leads with Ontraport

    • Show up, hustle, and put in your time

  • You have to cross-pollinate with your leads who opt-in

  • Include video on your blogs

  • Bring people back to your published content

  • Your site is your home base. It’s what you own.

  • Published content is the site, while promotional content is social media.

  • You only need three promotional sites to do this right. You can’t do everything right by being on every platform.

  • Meet your clients where they are

  • On “blog day,” she treats it like a launch

    • Animated Gifs

    • Updates link in her Instagram bio

    • Goes live on Instagram at the same time each week (stays live for 24 hours) and 3x viewers on replay

    • Does not repurpose her videos. Wants followers to watch soon for fear of missing out

  • Everything she does feeds into her main goals. This is not all giggles.

  • They batch videos (6-10) with outfit changes, intros, outros, scripting, transcription, blog post creation

    • 6-10 hours per blog post

    • Makes it so good you come back for more

  • People make too little money because they complicate things

  • Show up consistently

  • Spends money on professional photos annually

  • Left Periscope and Snapchat

  • The magic is in the video

  • She’ll go live on Facebook at the same time every two weeks

  • Play to your strengths. If you’re an introvert, then create great written content.

  • It’s okay to go live wherever you are to “take your followers with you”

  • Creates micro-groups of 15 on Instagram

  • Strive to surprise and delight

  • You can be an affiliate and recommend tools that make sense to grow your income

  • Take the #SueBMadeMeDoIt challenge – search it on Instagram

    • Let her know your favorite thing you learned on this

    • Tag @SueBZimmerman and @SalesWhisperer

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