How To Set Up Your Instagram Account For Success | With Brandon Brown Of Media Whisper

Brian: [00:00:00] This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode one 31 welcome back to another episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood, and I'm here with a special cohost slash. Guest. My good friend. Brandon Brown of media whisper. Say hi to everyone real quick.

Brandon: [00:00:32] What's up. Thanks for having me.

Brian: [00:00:33] Yeah. Brandon Brown is a really good friend of mine. He taught a workshop inside of the profitable producer course on social media, and also I think you helped with the Facebook ads thing too.

I honestly can't

Brandon: [00:00:43] of years

Brian: [00:00:43] is this couple years ago. Yeah. Anyways, so Brandon has an agency called media whisper, and we'll get into what your agency does and what we can take away from it as audio people, but before we do all that.

Brandon: [00:00:53] Audio people. I like that.

Brian: [00:00:55] Yeah, I just call us audio people. I don't know what that means, but

Brandon: [00:00:58] mole man.

Brian: [00:00:59] everyone's all over the place.

When it comes to that, we have like people who do like voiceover work for commercials and TV and stuff, or an audio books we have, I just don't even know what to call our audience anymore. They've dubbed themselves the six figure sexes and are literally in our Facebook community. That's like the going

Brandon: [00:01:14] Okay. I like

Brian: [00:01:15] know how I feel about it, but Brandon, how you been during the quarantine stuff.

Brandon: [00:01:19] I've been, okay. This is the longest I've been in Nashville for any consecutive period of time in years. Literally.

Brian: [00:01:26] And forgot also was my roommate for two years. I forgot to mention that little tidbit. We lived together for a couple of years, so he travels all the time with, he's in a band called Veridian.

Brandon: [00:01:35] Yeah. Between work, music, fun than family. The last couple of years I've averaged 40 to 45% of the year being out of town. So now it's may already. I've been in town for two months, I guess, and that's extremely bizarre for me. So I'm over it. To be honest. I've been running every other day to stay sane.

Brian: [00:01:57] yeah. Between you and like one other person, y'all are the only two people and yes, I did use the word y'all. Y'all are the only two people I've seen in person since all of this shit went down like mid-March, so.

Brandon: [00:02:08] I have a very small number of quarantine buddies that I've seen. Yeah. But it's not more than once a week that I'll actually directly interact with other people.

Brian: [00:02:17] Yeah. So people can't see this cause we're not on video. But Brandon is in my podcast office right now and we are the socially distance acceptable six feet apart

Brandon: [00:02:25] Yeah. It might even be a little more than than six feet. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's been an interesting time. You know, it was kind of a hard adjustment for me. I had a lot of trips plan that have been canceled or postponed and yeah. Our band was supposed to be in Europe on tour right now. That hopefully is just postponed.

It's,

Brian: [00:02:42] Yeah. A lot of our listeners are in touring bands, are they like do audio on the side, whether they're touring or whatever. So a lot of our audience has been hit hard by canceled tours.

Brandon: [00:02:50] Yeah, man, I know there's, it sucks, you know, from that regard, like especially for us, this was probably going to be the, one of the biggest stories we'd ever done in some really cool European cities at some amazing venues. And now it's just, just been here, you know, picking up my dog's poop around the neighborhood and stuff.

Just,

Brian: [00:03:07] They explain it for people. I mean, I don't know if our audience has heard of your band Verde. It's like a, I don't know what even to call you. What genre would you say alternative

Brandon: [00:03:15] Yeah. With a female singer.

Brian: [00:03:17] you guys like you peaked in life when this happened, and this is as far as I'm concerned, you played in this like 2000 year old arena in Italy.

It looks almost identical to the Colosseum in Rome, but it's in what city is it. Verona, and it's like a kept up in modern terms, like they've just renovated, but the exterior, it looks almost exactly like the Roman

Brandon: [00:03:37] Yes. Yeah. That's probably the coolest. I will, I mean, I certainly will never forget. Having the opportunity to play there. It was an amazing show. That's how we kicked off the last European tour. Yes. The arena Devona. It's built in 30 a D well, Christ was still alive and they don't do a lot of,

Brian: [00:03:55] at the end there.

Brandon: [00:03:55] yeah. Right, right.

They're not the best years for him. Maybe, I don't know. They don't do a lot of concerts there. They mostly just do like a summer opera series. Yeah. It looks just like the Roman Coliseum, except it's set up with. Better seating and acoustics, I guess. Yeah. We're one of very few rock bands that has actually played there.

I think it was awesome. Yeah, so that was last year, and we were about to follow up and do another tour and yeah. Now this whole thing just threw a wrench in

Brian: [00:04:21] plans are, are done.

Brandon: [00:04:22] Yeah. Yes. Our agency, you know, we work mostly with music venues.

Brian: [00:04:28] well, that's right. Just to kind of clear everything up. Like Brandon runs a social media agency called media whisper. I started talking about that beginning, and you guys work with like most of the live nation venues in the U S you work with a lot of hotels

Brandon: [00:04:39] Right, right.

Brian: [00:04:40] and these are like two of the areas hit hardest in all of this.

Brandon: [00:04:43] Yeah, I'm shaking my head with it because I don't know what else to say. It's like for the first seven years of the company, probably we just did all music all the time. So music, venues, festivals, things like that, the things that got people out of the house, buying tickets. And then three years ago when we started diversifying more.

And hotels have become our second biggest client base thinking, Oh, we finally like weaned herself off of the teat of the live music industry a bit, you know, and we've diversified and now both of those industries. So I've just been hit harder than, than everything else,

Brian: [00:05:16] The word is decimated.

Brandon: [00:05:18] is correct. Yeah.

I mean, it's crazy. We do, thankfully, have a lot of those relationships still in tax. It's not like everything has crashed and burned, and we've been able to keep our full staff of 20 people and anticipate that we'll be able to do that. So we're pretty lucky in that regard, considering the types of clients we work with.

And we do other, you know, we work with some consumer package brands. We work with streaming video services and some really cool stuff outside of those. But by and large, yeah, we work with dozens and dozens of music venues and dozens of

Brian: [00:05:46] That's right. You work with that horror video

Brandon: [00:05:48] Yeah. Shutter shutter? Yeah. It's owned by AMC networks and another guy that Brian and I both know manages that account, and yeah, it's just all like horror and thriller, you know, movies

Brian: [00:06:00] they've like, they've exploded just for the same reason. All the other video streaming

Brandon: [00:06:03] Exactly. Yeah. They're, they're crazy right now. Like it's insane. Yes. Yeah. So that's, yeah. My life in a big way has been disrupted and, um, you know, being forced to wallow in it at home, but hopefully we get back to normal here pretty soon. Yeah.

Brian: [00:06:18] I mean, I, I'm right there with you, man,

Brandon: [00:06:19] What about you? What's a, what's your routine look like compared to before.

Brian: [00:06:25] You know, no ones. We haven't, they haven't really got to talk about it. I guess since maybe a little bit I talked about with Chris, but it's been. Surprisingly like terrifyingly unchanged. Like it's like when I look at my life, like my day to day, like I don't go to the gym right now cause gyms are closed.

That's, that's a change. And I had a two week trip to Japan just canceled on me because of obvious reasons.

Brandon: [00:06:46] Yeah. When our chore for Scott postpone, I was like, Oh, I'll just go to Japan with these guys, and they should, obviously that didn't happen.

Brian: [00:06:52] Did not pan out. So other than that, like. When you look at your life and it hasn't changed much after such a big event. There's either something really wrong or really right, and I'm not quite sure which is which yet.

Brandon: [00:07:03] Time will tell.

Brian: [00:07:04] Yeah, time will tell. Yeah. But like me and Meghan have managed not to kill each other.

We love each other. We still hang out with each other, like all day, every day, and it's been that way for a while

Brandon: [00:07:13] Yeah. I guess probably the only thing I've seen that's changed for you guys is just you're not hosting dinners at your place like you like to do. You treat the friend group, you know, in that way. So we've been able to do a one on one, but hopefully when this is all lifted, we can have a big family dinner.

Brian: [00:07:27] Yeah, we have like a, we have a big ass table that seats 10 people and for obvious reasons we can't have friends over to fill that table up, but we can like awkwardly sit across the table from like one person.

Brandon: [00:07:36] Yeah, right.

Brian: [00:07:37] you over for

Brandon: [00:07:37] Yeah, that was great. It's the best food I've had this whole time. It's like one of my home home alone. I just, you know, take a piece of Turkey and like roll it around a piece of cheese and

Brian: [00:07:47] That's actually really good. I forgot it. You did that and I used to do that when I live with you and I haven't done that since, but that's a little fun hack right there. If you need to change mills up a little bit, it gets old.

Brandon: [00:07:57] Oh yeah,

Brian: [00:07:57] been like three years since I've lived with, or two years in the live with

Brandon: [00:08:00] I really don't do that too much, but in a pinch, if I'm like, you know, needing a quick fix and I don't want to cook, but all that to say the food we ate over here was much better

Brian: [00:08:08] Okay. Yeah, yeah,

Brandon: [00:08:08] taco.

Brian: [00:08:11] All right. So there's a reason. There's a reason I got Brandon in here, not just to talk about our lives and like what happens outside of does this world or what's happening because of coronavirus. I promise is the reason for, and it's kind of tied back to some of the past guests we've had.

Mark Eckert and Joe Wadsworth both talked about the importance of social media to their strategy, and it comes to getting customers and Brandon, it's just a good friend of mine who runs the social media agency that does nothing but social media for a lot of big brands. So I was like, Hey Brandon, can you come in here and talk to us about social media?

So that is what I brought you in here for. You are the resident expert in the six figure home studio world when it comes to social media.

Brandon: [00:08:47] That's fun.

Brian: [00:08:48] So we chatted a bit before this interview and talked about some things that we could talk about. And I want to start with Instagram because this is the area that most of our audience is in, and this is not everybody.

A lot of people are just working in Facebook, but Instagram is the area that we have found that most musicians, and thus most studios are hanging out, and this is an area that people could. Definitely improve their strategies. This is how Joe Wadsworth at the online recording studio. I can't remember the episode number.

It was like one 26 I don't have them up in front of me right now. I think it was the one 26 anyways, he talked about being able to feed the mouths of 30 audio engineers just from the leads they get from Instagram. And you had this really interesting thing that we talked about that I want to start on here and that is setting up your Instagram profile. And there's two things I want to talk about. First and foremost, like what are some general things you do when you help a new client set up their Instagram profile for like maximum efficiency from like a profile standpoint, like they above the photos thing and then also the idea of the. Instagram and I needed to like come up with a culture and a name for this and like trademark and all that shit, but like the Instagram landing page strategy, like I love that idea.

So first let's talk about in that order.

Brandon: [00:09:57] Yeah, this is the real exciting part. Starting your first Instagram account. No, just kidding. But no, setting up the account is, most people might be familiar with that if you're on the platform and with our clients. Yeah. The first thing we'll do is to kind of audit their existing presence, assuming they have one, and a lot of times you do find that they set up their account years ago and it's just outdated.

Right. So they haven't updated the bio. The link might be. You know the links is heading to your website, but could it point to a specific page on your website instead? You know, especially if you're using that to generate leads for your business. Is your homepage strong enough to have that be where you point people and it's kind of just doing an audit of your own brand and of your own assets?

Like do you have a contact button on there? Have you converted it to be a business profile versus just a personal

Brian: [00:10:44] let me, let me stop you on that. So there's a couple of good things that you get when you convert to a business. The file that people may not know about that is getting insights. Like you get actual like an area just

Brandon: [00:10:53] to get some data,

Brian: [00:10:54] Yeah. Some more data. It's like it gives you some actionable insights on how your efforts are working as far as profile views and what I call like top of funnel stats.

Brandon: [00:11:02] Yup. Yeah, and it also allows you to start advertising, which I'm sure we'll get more into. It's not as scary as it sounds if you haven't pulled the trigger on that yet. You can link the Instagram account to your Facebook page and there's some benefits there depending on. What type of product do you have?

I know this is audio people or however you refer to your audience, so they might be a little, yeah, six figure sexy is they might be a little less product based, but in case anyone's listening that does have something along those lines that allows you to have that feature that you've seen probably on Instagram where you can actually link out directly to a product C.

The cost of it added to your cart, kind of. That all comes from having a business Instagram profile as opposed to a personal one. So yeah, there's different advantages there. So a lot of times that's something people overlook because they just haven't thought about it from that perspective. And then again, above kind of you said to sort of above the line, you know, above the grid of your profile.

That area also contains your Instagram story highlights, which is a great way to show off just different things, you know, for, for our hotel clients.

Brian: [00:12:00] are one of those things that I have on my personal Facebook, but they're all just like none of our business related. Like my personal, I'm sorry, Instagram. My personal Instagram is in no way optimized the six figure. I'm city of Instagram is really where I need the work because I have two posts on there in the lifetime of it.

We have like 2000 followers on there and then I don't even have an Instagram for my studio, so like. Our audience audiences all across the board as far as like whether they have one or they don't, whether it's set up, whether it's not. I'd love to know more about the actual, like is there a strategy behind using those?

What did you call them? What do they

Brandon: [00:12:30] The story highlights the example that comes to mind for me and just the types of clients we have for hotels. It's a great way to show off maybe different aspects of the property. So we have one highlight that's just rooms. One highlight that's. The restaurant onsite, one highlight that might be the neighborhood that it sends.

So that way, as more and more people are doing business on Instagram and discovering brands they want to work with, you, give them a taste of all of the facets of your brand through these story highlights. Just like you would different tabs on your website. You know you have your about page, you have your, your photos

Brian: [00:13:03] so just to kind of like bring it home to studio owners, you could have, this can be part of your sales process, your presale process, and this is something that most people don't have, which is like helping the personal along the buyer journey before they ever talked to you. This helps speed up the sales process a lot, and it's something that people under utilize.

So you could have one that's like, here's a tour of the studio. That's one story. Highlight, and just for those who are not following along very well, if you do Instagram stories, which pretty much anyone who is on Instagram has done Instagram stories, you can create what's called a story highlight, which is just a collection of Instagram stories.

And do they have to be in sequential order or can you pick and choose which ones you want out of like a a

Brandon: [00:13:39] They are in sequential order, so you can plan it, you know, down to the nth degree as much as you want, or it can just sort of happen real time. But essentially of all the stories you've ever posted to your Instagram, you can go back and choose from that archive. And create highlights, you know, containing the ones that you want.

So you can group them based on topics. So for your studio, if you have great gear, you know, and you want to give a tour of the studio or show off your gear that way, if someone's looking for a studio in your area, they planned it on your page for one reason or another, they can see, Oh, this place is legit, this guy's legit.

I see that as a professional setup. Maybe there's another story that shows, you know, a little behind the scenes of you working or tracking an artist or tracking vocals or whatever it might be. They see, okay. They've done this before. They have professional gear. If you do, you know, choose wisely what you put in the highlights.

But if when someone's thinking about maybe messaging you or getting in touch with you, it gives them that level of comfort where they've learned a little bit about you. They feel like they've done the research, and in their mind they've vetted you more than just sending you a random

Brian: [00:14:36] And this is a big thing about it. Some people like they may be vaguely interested in like what you do, but doing something like this could be the difference between them reaching out to you and never reaching out to you. So take this sort of stuff seriously. So one four, and this is just ideas and coming up with, off the top of my head, talking to Brandon here, one would be a the story.

Highlight four, a tour of your studio. If you have people actually coming into your studios. If you're mixing engineer, mastering engineer, and your studio is nothing special. It's probably not worth doing. If you have a really nice studio, it's definitely worth doing. Another one might be how the process works, like what's it like to work with me?

What are the steps involved? So maybe you messaged me on Instagram and you fill out a form somewhere. Maybe from there we'll take your songs and we'll do X, Y, and Z here. Basically you're explaining your process for your studio and everybody, by the way, every single person needs to have a clear process that they follow with every single client, and if they don't, you're leaving money on the table because of the amount of extra work you're going to be doing.

Scrambling because you're not following a specific process, so maybe you have one for the process that you're explaining that to people.

Brandon: [00:15:33] You could even have one for your rates. You know, like let's say you're operating based on a fixed rate sheet. So I know everyone's business a little bit different, but it, that doesn't have to be a video of you talking to the camera. It can literally be a text that you type, you know, on the app.

It could just be text on a black background. And then your, a little highlight, your story highlight is titled. The studio rates or rates, and then people open it and it's just your price sheet. You know? It doesn't have to be even a photo or a video. It could be just straight informational. And that's something we do the, you know, going back to the hotel example, if they have a restaurant.

You know, we'll have a story highlight just for the restaurant. The first slide of that story highlight might be a great shot of the restaurant, and the second one might be the hours, the address, like how to find us or whatever it might be. So you can squeeze in just straight information there and it just becomes like a landing page on your website essentially.

You can structure it however you want.

Brian: [00:16:24] Yeah. And one could be like your services you offer. So creative way might be doing like, here's the services offer, one is guitar tracking or guitar ramping or whatever, and it's a video of you actually doing that. One is we do vocal overdubs and it's you actually in the studio doing that so you can do a more creative way of showing off the services that you do so they can see what it's like to actually work with you.

And then one of thing is Brandon talked about public pricing. If you do have your prices publicly, it's not a bad story highlight to have. I've always been on the side of, I don't like public pricing. So I like to have quote based pricing where someone contacts you, you have a conversation and based on the needs of their project, you give them pricing.

Even if you have a flat rate per song or it's pretty standard pricing. I still like having that conversation because the earlier you can have that conversation, you have that lead now and you can follow up with them. The ball's in your court now versus them seeing the pricing and then bouncing and he never seeing them again because they didn't start the

Brandon: [00:17:15] I'm the same way on the agency side. You know, we don't, some agencies do that. You go to their website, you select the plan that gets you 30 Facebook posts this month or whatever and X number of hours and X number of ad campaigns or whatever. But for me, I like to know what I'm getting into and what my team's being asked to do.

Yeah. I always like to have that conversation and understand. What's their budget? We're really, what are the needs? And then I can provide them a price quote that's appropriate for me and our team's efforts. So yeah, the fixed rate sheet, you know, that might not be for everyone, but just for sake of

Brian: [00:17:45] people do work on, on rate sheets no matter what I say, they still do it. And if they do that, this is a great place to put that. And even if you don't. Putting a tab for pricing. People are looking for pricing. That's the thing. They want to know the pricing. That's one of the foremost questions in their mind.

Have a card for that, and it just says, because of the way we, because of the way we operate, everything's a special project. Just contact me through Instagram or contact me on my clicking the link in my bio or whatever, and we can talk about your project

Brandon: [00:18:10] Yeah. It's almost like you give them a false lead on most where they see the label pricing, like, Oh, I wonder what the studio costs, and then, yeah. The story highlight, actually, once they click into it says, please contact us or click the link in our bio for

Brian: [00:18:20] If you're going to do that, by the way, if you're going to, it's almost a bait and switch, like here's our pricing. Actually not if you're gonna do that, have a reason for it. You can say like, we don't do public pricing because every project is special

Brandon: [00:18:30] Yeah. I like that. Yeah.

Brian: [00:18:31] have a reasonable, and even if it's kind of like a pretty broad reason like that, it's still at least like, Oh yeah, that makes sense.

I'll contact them and just see what the price is for the project.

Brandon: [00:18:38] Yeah, totally.

Brian: [00:18:39] All right, so I like this so far we have, real quick on your business accounts, do every single one of 'em have like a logo as the profile image or do people do a photo of somebody that,

Brandon: [00:18:47] I like to keep that as clean and as branded as possible.

Brian: [00:18:51] I'm talking about the profile photo

Brandon: [00:18:52] the actual profile photo. Yeah, so I prefer having that be a logo. Most of the time, if any of the listeners don't have a logo, you're still kind of figuring out the branding, do whatever represents your business the best. Maybe it's a photo of some of your gear, maybe it is your face, you know, and just whatever you would use on your personal profile.

I'm not sure.

Brian: [00:19:09] Yeah. I would say people that are, I mean a lot of our audience is branded as they are the business basically. So they might be like with Chris Graham mastering my cohost. He is the face of his business. So it would make way more sense for him to have his face as the profile image compared to like Chris Graham mastering logo, which is just, it's just

Brandon: [00:19:26] text. Yeah.

Brian: [00:19:27] not great. So it's not like, but there's also one of our listeners, the Foxborough is a mastering studio. Mike, he's not necessarily the face of his brand, although he is the person that runs that business that he is the guy behind that. But he also has like good branding. He has like a bright orange pop color and he has a really good logo that's like a little Fox for that business.

I would probably have the little Fox logo as the

Brandon: [00:19:47] Yeah.

Brian: [00:19:47] cause it goes along with his branding. So if you have a really well-branded studio, it makes more sense. If you're more personal brand focused, then have the personal profile in

Brandon: [00:19:55] Totally with you on that. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because most of our clients are larger businesses, so they all have a logo. Even if it is just a stylized font text version of there. Brand that is their public facing logo on their website, on marketing materials, essentially. See, I'm having to like step it back a few notches in my head for, you know, someone who might just be starting out and establishing their brand.

But I'm with you. I think you summed it up perfectly,

Brian: [00:20:19] Yeah. And then one of the thing is, you mentioned this really early on in this conversation, so I'm calling way back to that now. When it comes to the link in your bio. Most people just link straight to their website. And you mentioned something about maybe it makes more sense to link to a landing page of some sort.

So in some cases it makes more sense to have a specific landing page for a specific area. And let me just backup real quick. Sometimes if you're running Facebook ads, for example, or Instagram ads for example, you're not going to just dump them onto your homepage. That's actually one of the worst places to dump them.

You need to put them on a page that has a specific goal in mind. And for a lot of us, that's the goal is to contact somebody or to book a call or to get a quote or whatever that is for your business. That's like the number one goal, and so that's the only thing they can do on the page. They can either do that action or they can leave and all the information on the page is hopefully helping presale that person to the point where they trust you enough to take the next step.

And there's nothing that's going to distract them from that. So with what we've talked about with Instagram so far, it almost makes more sense to put someone to a specific landing page for people that come through your Instagram profile because they should be probably pre-sold in some way, shape, or form if they're coming from Instagram, if they've watched your story highlights, if they've seen.

Your Instagram landing page, which we'll talk about in a second, which is a really cool strategy that I can't wait to talk about, or they've seen the posts that you've been posting regularly on Instagram, like no matter what they've seen, they have probably more intention behind them than somebody that just randomly comes to.

Like my studio website.com or

Brandon: [00:21:45] Yeah. Right. It could be somewhat prequalified in a way.

Brian: [00:21:48] Yeah, that's, and that's the term pre-qualified. It's like someone that's gone through your marketing material. They're like a hot lead, and I'm trying to stay as far away from marketing jargon as I can, but sometimes it's impossible. So having a specific landing page for those people that's a little bit more linearly focused and not just bouncing around a different pages and some pages on your site and trying to link them to different things.

Brandon: [00:22:08] Yeah, absolutely. I like that, and I originally mentioned that because maybe someone doesn't have. Their website fully fleshed out or it they're not proud of the homepage. It doesn't mean you have to point people to a page that you're not proud of or you don't want them to. Maybe you're Facebook page is really what you mostly use to interact with fans or clients and customers.

You can link that to your Facebook page if you want and you can link it to your LinkedIn or whatever it might be if you don't have your website looking good and able to really take advantage of those leads. So there's no formula that says that link has to go to your studio.com you know what I mean?

Brian: [00:22:41] Yeah. So one thing, and this is, I'm kind of bouncing around here, but our podcast is always an advice buffet, and so because of that, we can pick and choose wherever we want. You talked about having a button on your profile, this is only for business accounts, correct?

Brandon: [00:22:52] Yeah. The contact

Brian: [00:22:53] What can those contact button call to actions be?

Do you know off the top of your

Brandon: [00:22:56] I believe it's, it can be email or a phone call.

Brian: [00:23:01] Get directions is one, but I wouldn't

Brandon: [00:23:02] Yeah. Get directions. Yeah. Probably not super relevant. I think that's it. I think it's email, phone call or get directions.

Brian: [00:23:09] Cool. So it would make more sense for people to do email or can you link out to a website, like visit a website or anything and you have a link in your

Brandon: [00:23:16] Yeah. The link is there. I want to say the contact buttons, I want to say it's more focused on the actual contact side, so, and you can hide it all together. So if you just want people to go to your website contact form and not email you directly, you don't have to have that appear there.

Brian: [00:23:31] I'm curious if there's anyone running their entire business off Instagram because I mean, you could theoretically set your Instagram page up to do all of your selling for you, much like your website would do. And you'd never have to leave the Instagram experience, and I wouldn't recommend them and do this.

This is like against everything in my body because of the way things are. You can't really set up your Instagram profile the way you can. Your website. You can customize every aspect of your website. You can brand it, you can set up where the button goes and what it says and what it does when it's clicked.

And you can't do a lot of these things on Instagram that you're just limited what their thing is. So I like having a website.

Brandon: [00:24:01] Yeah. Oh, definitely. I mean, I think you can't bet that Instagram is going to be around forever, right?

Brian: [00:24:06] Yep. And also what happens, and this is one of my hesitations for telling people to convert to a business account. What happens does that hurt your organic reach

Brandon: [00:24:13] Hmm.

Brian: [00:24:14] because you're now a business

Brandon: [00:24:15] Yeah. To be honest, that's why I haven't converted my personal profile. Just you know that Brandon Brown, like I haven't converted that to a business profile because I'm somewhat afraid slash anticipating that Instagram will want to try to monetize my business profile and squeeze out my organic reach.

Brian: [00:24:32] Which is what they did on Facebook business pages, so it makes sense. It would make sense that they would do it on FA, on Instagram business

Brandon: [00:24:37] Yeah. Yeah, and I don't think that's the case. Yeah. Though we haven't seen that. It really comes down to how good is the content you're posting. That's the key with any social, it comes down to your content strategy, right? And it needs to be, if you're going to be posting, make it worthwhile, make it something that if you saw it in your feed, you would want to engage with.

Make the copy something that you'd want to read, you know, that doesn't seem cheesy, overly salesy, whatever it might be. I mean, I was just having this conversation with a client literally while I was on my way over here. You know, making sure they want to make sure that when they see, that's a whole portfolio of hotels that when they see.

One of their posts come across their personal feed in Instagram that it's something they want to read, you know? And they're not like, why am I following this account? And that's a, it sounds so simple, but we get lost in, Oh my gosh, you need to convey all of these little details in everything I post and all the minutia.

Keep that minutia on your website and give people a reason to go there. Don't word vomit out this. The press release, you know, in the caption of your social media posts. Cause that's not what that platform is for. It needs to be easy to digest. It needs to be social at the core of it. And really it's just the quick barometer test is what I want to read this.

If I saw this come through my feed and it wasn't my product or brand, is it something I would want to keep following and engaged with? And if the answer is no, change it.

Brian: [00:25:55] This is right in line with our philosophy behind Go-Giver marketing, and I don't know if that's a real phrase, but I use it all the time. Like. If you know what the Go-Giver is, the book, then you know what Go-Giver marketing is. It's adding value in everything that you do, and if your posts are not adding value, AK either entertaining or informing or something of the sort.

If it's not adding value in some way, then there's no reason for somebody to follow you.

Brandon: [00:26:17] Pretty much, yeah. At that point, you might as well just run ads, you know, and that might kind of segue into what we were talking about with the landing page, you know, whatever we want to brand that as, but.

Brian: [00:26:26] So this is the Instagram landing page. I'll come up with a cool like marketing system names

Brandon: [00:26:30] it so many names over the years, and I should have branded it by now, but this what made me think of it as, you know, if you're not posting content or you just aren't know capturing content, you don't have the bandwidth to create that type of content. I mean,

Brian: [00:26:44] like all the time. My,

Brandon: [00:26:45] course. Yeah. We all run into

Brian: [00:26:47] my last photo that I posted on my personal Instagram was my wedding day, and then it's only true love of SDL tones. He released a new plugin. Did I have a pack on. And he sent me a video

Brandon: [00:26:59] Yup. Yeah.

Brian: [00:27:00] and so he created that for me, and I was just like, I'll post it on your launch day.

Sure. So those are the two posts I've had in the last 15 months

Brandon: [00:27:08] Yeah. Yeah. So, so if you're a Brian out there and you don't have the bandwidth or the desire or the means or whatever it might be to regularly post engaging content, that's okay. You know, because your core business is not. Being an Instagram personality, right? It's running your business that's growing.

What you can do that provides the most value to other people, which is the audio service. You know that I imagine most people listening are providing. So don't hit pause on your core responsibilities just to try to become an Instagram Wiz and game the algorithm and become an influencer. And so that's fine.

And so if you're not posting, honestly, we run into this with the band when we have a lot going on, we have a lot going on. It's nonstop content. But if we're not on the road and we're not in the studio, and we have three or four months where we're just.

Brian: [00:27:52] Basically you're in quarantine.

Brandon: [00:27:54] Yeah. Like right now, right? It's like, what the heck do we post about?

Like, we're not even hanging out in rehearsing because we're distancing from each other. Right? And so the band's accounts, they go through these ebbs and flows. So I get it. You know, it doesn't matter what brand you are, you're going to run into that for the most part. So if you're not like. Just creating content all the time and doing it in a way that is engaging, that makes people want to follow you and see it.

That's okay. So Brian and I were talking earlier just on the way in about for those types of people, there's a way to set up your Instagram account for your business that doesn't require you to update it every day. It doesn't require you to

Brian: [00:28:25] you need, you can't actually post on it

Brandon: [00:28:27] Yeah, you can, but, but it looks fine if you don't, and if you do, you'd need to be more strategic about it.

Right. And it leaves the content side to just the stories, which can be very,

Brian: [00:28:38] story. I post stories way more often.

Brandon: [00:28:40] of course,

Brian: [00:28:41] yeah, I've had two Facebook or Instagram posts in the last like 18

Brandon: [00:28:45] Yeah. But hundreds of stories probably. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so the great thing about stories is they can be and kind of should be real time, less edited, more authentic. And so that's easy, right? Like we can all, it might not be easy. I don't love turning the camera on myself and being the, you know, the, the, the face in the camera, like influencer style.

I probably could promote myself better if I were more comfortable doing that.

Brian: [00:29:08] We need to get a mindset coaching here to coach us out of the mindset of like selfie style videos are stupid. Cause I'm the same way. I'm like, I hate, I hate just like the vlog style videos. You know.

Brandon: [00:29:16] Which is so funny because you're sitting behind a microphone on a podcast like you, you know? It's, it's just like that, except you also have a camera on you, essentially. But I, I'm the same way. I'm like, I don't want to be that person holding my phone up or on a selfie stick recording myself talking while I walk around.

You know, all that. This is going down a rabbit trail. I know. You remember why I mentioned that.

Brian: [00:29:35] Let me send her us back here again, Brandon, we're talking about social media strategy on Instagram.

For someone who doesn't have time to post regularly, if at all. That's me and that's a lot of our audience. I love this idea of a landing page. The Instagram landing page because it's such a profile up for people who either find you through search, who finds you through, if you're having conversations with them, like Joe Wadsworth does with the online recording studio where you're actually doing client outreach or cold outreach on Instagram and having conversations when they come back to your profile, this is set up really well for those people.

Or if your main content creation strategy on Instagram is Instagram stories and then people click through to your actual profile just to see what you're up to or what your studio is or what you're about. This is a really good thing to add on top of all this stuff we've talked about so far. It is setting up a grid of photos that all go together in a certain way, and I'll talk about this.

Brandon: [00:30:24] Yeah, well, there's a couple of real life examples. We do this with a number of our client brands and man, I wish this account were still active. There's an elitist comedian who we. Worked with, I don't know if I can say his name,

Brian: [00:30:38] I know it has, but I'm not going to say

Brandon: [00:30:39] yeah, it rhymes with cave Depel. Um, or something similar to that. Um, we were,

Brian: [00:30:45] Yeah. There were people that are like, Oh yeah, I know what you're talking about. Or they're like, what the fuck?

Brandon: [00:30:49] yep. So we did a really cool project with this comedians team, and it was all about highlighting the experience at. This residency that he did at a really beautiful venue, a theater. And so we wanted the Instagram account to really be striking when someone visited it. It looked clean, it looked professional, and we weren't going to be posting little individual square photos every day.

And so after each of his performances, we'd get a photo from his photographer and we made the Instagram account into more of a landing page, which is what we're. The term came from earlier. So we've all probably seen this in one way or another where you go to a company's Instagram page or a lot of musicians have done a great job at this where they've taken one photo.

And instead of cramming that into one little square, they've chopped that up so that it actually takes up the full grid. You have three squares all linking together, or six of the Instagram squares we're linking together. So we've designed a number of client Instagram accounts this way, either because it's a high profile, a person, like I hinted at before, or maybe it's a brand that just doesn't have a lot of content, but they do have.

A couple of photos to work with or a big logo or something like that. And so when someone, it comes to your Instagram account, it gives them a reason to spend more than a half second on it. It's kind of striking when you first see it, it gives you the incentive to scroll down, you know, and actually see what else is there.

And anytime you can capture someone's attention for a couple seconds on social, you've won. That is what it's all about because we're constantly scrolling. You know, every single person's scrolling. I've heard the height of the statue of Liberty per day. That's how far our finger moves on our screen while we're scrolling through Instagram or in Facebook.

It's crazy, right? And so most of that is just nonstop. You're just looking for something that catches your attention. And so if a profile can catch your attention, you've won, even if it's just for a couple seconds and it gives people a reason to follow your account. You know, like the six figure home studio account,

Brian: [00:32:40] Is trash

Brandon: [00:32:41] you're getting a lot of traffic because I assume you're running paid traffic there.

You're running ads, you're getting a large number of people who are being reached by those ads. Then they go to the Instagram account and they see there's two posts and it, you know, it's not a very compelling reason for someone to follow the account and they don't spend any time there. You know?

Brian: [00:32:57] Well, let me, let me talk about that. I run a lot of ads on 600 on the studio specifically, and a lot of our listeners have seen those ads and we get hundreds of thousands of impressions per month on Instagram. And a lot of those people are coming and checking out the profile just cause they'll see something called the six figure home studio.

They'll see a post and they may sign up for something and then they may go check out the profile just to see what it's all about. And it's awful because I have. Actually, I think it's worse now than it was before. It used to have no posts

Brandon: [00:33:24] Oh,

Brian: [00:33:24] and we only followed me and Chris, the podcast goes, okay, and then we linked to the six figure home studio website.

Well, that's all we did, and I was like, you know what? That's fine, because someone will just go to our site if they, we'll learn more and that whatever. Like now it's even worse because we just have to shitty posts that Chris posted from now

Brandon: [00:33:41] Oh, God.

Brian: [00:33:42] year, there are no way go together. They're in no way value

Brandon: [00:33:45] Archives them. Just archive them.

Brian: [00:33:47] Yep.

Brandon: [00:33:48] add a third post at least, or

Brian: [00:33:49] Yeah, it's like not even a full row of photos. And so like this is, I heard the strategy of like a landing page grid, and I love this. So just to kind of think off the top of my head, it doesn't even necessarily have to be photos. It could be something that's like almost like a screenshot of a landing page, but the text is large and it makes sense when you're scrolling down Facebook where it's talking about either.

The studio or it's talking about something that's getting them to take an action or something. You could create something, and I'll play around with this for the six year old studio and see what I come up with. But any studio could come up with this because not everyone has ads running to hundreds of thousands of people per month.

Like that's, most people are not going to be doing that in their studio world, but the concept is the same. We're all having conversations with people. And they may find us through referrals or word of mouth or any one-to-one conversations we're having on Instagram, and they check out our profile and all of a sudden they're turned off because it's not set up well, or they just scroll around or like our hodgepodge of photos and it just doesn't look good.

I love this strategy of taking either a photo and breaking it up. But having some theme or call to action or something like a actual landing page or something you're giving away or something you're doing or something about your studio or your offer that you're doing that you're explaining in this grid.

And the further they scroll down, the deeper they get into this sort of thing. This is a cool strategy.

Brandon: [00:35:05] And part of the grid could be a big blocks of text and said, I like the idea. I hadn't thought about it not being photos, but you're right, it could literally be a white squares that, you know, you upload tons of white squares or black squares and just make a pattern or something like that. Something to catch people's eye.

But there should be a goal to it.

Brian: [00:35:21] Yeah. I think when I have the mind like an Instagram landing page, I love having the story highlights. I love having the highlights as almost like different menu options to see different things about your business. That's a really cool thing. That's like a landing page. I like having the link to a specific.

Landing page. And when we see a landing page, usually that is a page that has one specific thing that you can do on that page. Instagram, it's not really landing page cause there's like a thousand things they could do. So we're kind of using these interchangeably. But the link in the bio, you're linking to a page that is probably whatever step you want them to take to fill out a form or to book a call with you through Calendly or to message you through Facebook messenger or something, which is kind of redundant to take the back through the loop anyways.

Um. Some sort of thing to do. So I like the idea of even if you had part of your website or something set up where you have big text that you had like in a almost a narrow landing page thing where at red as you scroll down

Brandon: [00:36:13] Yeah. Yeah. I think of like a mobile view on a webpage, right?

Brian: [00:36:16] So if you have a lead magnet for your studio, this is a good place to promote that.

Maybe it's a screenshot of a mock up of your ebook that you give away or your PDF that you give away, and it just says, click the link in the bio to get this, and you're linking your bio. It takes them to the opt in for that. Like there's different things you could do to do that, even if it's just like contact us for pricing.

I mean, maybe you can have a much sexier thing than that that you're doing, but

Brandon: [00:36:36] Yeah, the sexier, the better.

Brian: [00:36:37] I'm spit balling here, so

Brandon: [00:36:38] course. Yeah. Why? I think, you know, the main thing is, and the reason why someone might consider doing this is because we all have limited time. Right. And if you're worried about everyone saying, my brand needs to be on social media, that's it for you. But if you've decided to be on social media.

And now you're worried about the amount of time it's going to take, or you're just, you don't have a great camera, you don't have a great phone or whatever it might be. You can't come up with engaging posts. You might not have to, we might just be able to spend one day, you know, or a couple hours on your Instagram profile.

Make that look as good as possible and not worry about having to schedule posts out. What tool am I going to use to schedule my calendar?

Brian: [00:37:14] than anything because. People's Instagrams now, like the bar is so

Brandon: [00:37:18] It is,

Brian: [00:37:19] have like a really good Instagram where all the color palettes go with each other. And like, people spend a lot of time, effort, energy, making sure their profile photos in a grid look together and coherent.

Brandon: [00:37:29] I used to post every day, like when I first got on Instagram years and years and years ago.

Brian: [00:37:33] it isn't, it didn't matter. It was all about the content. It wasn't about the like, how does it look when I scroll

Brandon: [00:37:38] exactly. Yeah. There was no bar, you know? It was just like, I'm sharing a photo each day because it's easy to, everyone's photos look the

Brian: [00:37:45] And now, I mean, granted, stories have kind of taken that place of the everyday thing, but it just has such a high bar that I am, I almost don't want to go through the trouble of like making a post that looks good.

Brandon: [00:37:56] Yeah, I, yeah. I've rarely posted now, unless it is like a professional photographer of, from a professional photographer of me on stage or photographer that we use, you know, for the hotels or something like that. You know, we first pitched this idea like for our music venue clients. They're not a great example of a brand that this would work for because they have tons of content to post about all the time.

You know, a music venue ideally should have a full calendar with a ton of shows, and so they always have tickets to sell. There's always something to talk about. So we do have content that can be posted on a regular

Brian: [00:38:27] single artist playing at those venues has professional photos to post, and they all look great,

Brandon: [00:38:31] Right, right. But on the flip side, think about a hotel that doesn't have a music venue, you know, built into it or whatever. The structure itself is not changing. They don't have events that they're selling tickets to. So this was really the first time we pitched this to a client, as far as I remember, is the Ludlow hotel in New York, still one of my favorite places on earth.

And you know, hoping that New York can kind of opened back up sooner than later. It's an amazing property step in and it's just, it's sexy. It's beautiful. Everyone loves it. There's just nothing bad I can say about it. And aesthetically every detail has been thought out and designed so well,

Brian: [00:39:05] photogenic

Brandon: [00:39:06] Right and there before they started working with us, you know, and they knew that this was an issue.

They just had some, like a front desk person running the Instagram account and they were posting bad quality phone photos from around the property occasionally. So the GM of the hotel got in touch with us and said, you know, if you go to our website and if you come on the property, you can see how amazing it is, but you go to our Instagram account and that, that doesn't translate at all.

It looks terrible. I'm like, all right, the first thing we're going to do. Yeah. Well first I kind of cast this vision and you know, proposed what I thought would be the best way to start and a plan of action. But as soon as we got our hands on the account, just archive all that old stuff. Anything that's not representing your brand well, there's nothing saying you have to keep that out online.

It doesn't matter if it's on Facebook, Instagram, whatever on your website, get rid of it and keep it fresh, make it look at it, and put your best foot forward. So for this hotel, which is close to 200 rooms, amazing. Someone went to their Instagram account, they saw a blurry photo. I a cap on the front desk, you know what I mean?

Literally it was like that. So we archived all that stuff so nobody can see it anymore. And we started uploading photos, you know, every was the hotel. They obviously had like great photos for their catalog and like for their website or whatever. So that's all we had to work with at first until we sent a photographer in there and we created, I would call it a mosaic, like maybe instead of landing

Brian: [00:40:20] Yeah.

Brandon: [00:40:21] like an Instagram mosaic.

Brian: [00:40:22] to me, these are two different things. A mosaic is,

Brandon: [00:40:25] Mosaic is where multiple smaller pieces all work together to make one larger

Brian: [00:40:30] Yeah. So you're basically taking a photo and cutting it up, and there's tools that do that for you where you like

Brandon: [00:40:34] There's an

Brian: [00:40:35] photo into nine bits, a square photo, nine bits. So it's three photo, three by three. So together on Instagram, the top nine looks like just one big photo

Brandon: [00:40:44] Right. Yeah. I know. It's hard to not have a

Brian: [00:40:46] yeah, I wouldn't have a visual here, so I'm trying to explain it.

The basis of that is the same. It's a mosaic still, but for me, and I'll still have to kind of flesh this out my head and try it out with some of our students and see what we can come up

Brandon: [00:40:56] Yeah, totally.

Brian: [00:40:57] the landing page is you are trying to push them to a specific action through this mosaic. So you're telling more of a

Brandon: [00:41:04] treating it like an extension of your

Brian: [00:41:05] Yes, yes. And through that you can set it up to look how you want to look versus Instagram where you are limited to their options of what they let you do. So.

Brandon: [00:41:13] No, I liked that a lot. And really to boil it down, this is for someone who's listening, who knows their brand needs to be on Instagram but doesn't have the time or the means to continually post engaging content. So instead. Just make the feed cohesive, make it look or be compelling enough in a way.

When someone does come to your profile, it gives them a reason to stay. It peaks their interest a little bit, and already you've hooked them a little bit, and that's the first step. And then it gives you the freedom to still do off the cuff content through stories. And that doesn't have to be perfect.

That doesn't have to be edited. You don't need a video production studio. It could be you facing your phone camera towards you and saying, Hey guys, I'm gonna give you swore on my studio today. Or rent. Yeah. A photo of an artist that you're working with who's tracking or whatever it might be. You know, endless.

You can do whatever you want. Yeah. The day to day stuff can instead be relegated to the story. And that way you're not putting just any random content on your feed. So for me, that's a way to set up a really professional looking Instagram profile that can work for you without consuming a lot of your time.

And then once you start running ads and driving people to it, you know, someone gets delivered an ad from your studio, they click through and they see your profile. You know, now it looks professional and it looks better than the six figure.

Brian: [00:42:26] yeah, it's insane that I haven't done this yet. I'll have to hire your company to do this for me cause I don't, I

Brandon: [00:42:30] just giving you a hard time, but there's a lot of brands out there that are like that. You know?

Brian: [00:42:33] Well, that's the thing is like I'm working with some of our students now to start running Facebook and Instagram ads. And honestly, most of us do Instagram if people don't know that, well, I talked about this last week on the episode where Facebook and Instagram are the same ad platform.

So if you're running ads on one, you can run ads to the other. And I love this idea of setting up their Instagram profile to really be a good place to find more information, to get the gist of what they're going to be. Experiencing when they hire somebody and not being this content machine, they have to keep turning out.

Let me, Instagram ads are not that expensive to run.

Brandon: [00:43:03] no. You can run a dollar a day. Yeah,

Brian: [00:43:04] So letting that be your content creation to get eyeballs on your page and let your page just be your Instagram page. Just be there to sell people on what you do. And that to me is a much more manageable strategy because that allows you to, once you get some good ad stuff, set up, some good ad funnels set up through, I mean, obviously you don't want your ad just to run people to your Instagram page.

That's stupid. But people will naturally click through to your Instagram page out of curiosity. And so you want them to all be funneled back into the same place to take that action that you want them to take. And so I love having this Instagram thing set up to do that. And once you have a good final setup that's running well, this is just something that keeps turning out work longterm for you.

So this goes right in line with that.

Brandon: [00:43:41] Yeah, absolutely. That's not taking away anything from people who are more content machines. You know, you mentioned Mark Eckert and his company that pitch earlier. He's just that dude in front of the camera, you know, he's got a big personality. He's comfortable talking to the camera. And he's pumping out content left and right.

So by no means should he stopped doing that and change his Instagram to be this mosaic landing page.

Brian: [00:44:02] But not everybody, not everyone has that kind of

Brandon: [00:44:04] exactly. Exactly.

Brian: [00:44:05] wants to be that person on camera. I've learned that image ads will work better for me because you can literally, if you know your audience well enough, you can find an image that you know will stop the scroll, which is the entire point of the creative, and let the ad copy the words in the ad, actually sell them on taking that next step.

And that's worked better for me in the over the last year.

Brandon: [00:44:23] Right? You know, you talked about having a good compelling photo. There's plenty of license free or free license images out there that you can use, so you don't even need to, there's just so many ways to go about it without needing a professional photographer or a video, any kind of production. And there's tons of apps.

Even mobile apps, like Canva is a great one, you know, that does help you if you have a photo that you think. Could look a little bit better or be formatted slightly better for social. Canvas is a great app, and I'm not getting any kickback from that, but honestly, there's just tools out there you can, you can find.

Yeah,

Brian: [00:44:53] just, just, and if you want to talk about ad stuff, I'm happy to go there. If we have time today, I'll just say right now, I've run a lot of money in ads in the last year, and. A lot of the photos are just plain photos, nothing done to them. They're just photos of studios. So something that my audience is interested in, like good-looking studios.

So if you find photos that are interesting to your target customer, you don't have to do anything special about that. You just find something that's like interesting to them, whether it's a live photo of a band or whatever. Just make sure you're not like stealing photos and doing things illegal. You have the rights to it or permission from the PR, like you have to make sure you're doing

Brandon: [00:45:26] Yeah. Please don't steal photos.

Brian: [00:45:28] No, not especially not on paid advertising.

Brandon: [00:45:31] definitely not. Yeah. I'm convinced that there are lawyers who are kind of like the ambulance chasers of Instagram that well, proactively contact photographers and say, Hey, did you see this music venue posted your photo? And we can make them pay for that.

You know, even if they credited you or whatever. We've seen waves of lawsuits go through the music venues over the years and end up honestly costing them a decent amount of money from just because lawyers are being, you know, people are being opportunistic

Brian: [00:45:57] We had a lawyer contact six figure in studio for image we had on a blog post. And, but we had a license for it because we got it through I stock photo. But, but like he, it was almost like he was the police. Like we almost had to prove to him that we had the license for it, but it was like, if that dude's legit and is like out there like trying to collect on people that have not licensed photos, like I would hate to be on the wrong end of a

Brandon: [00:46:18] definitely. Yeah. Yeah. You just don't want to invite

Brian: [00:46:20] even if even if like, even if you win, you still are going to be paying money to defend yourself

Brandon: [00:46:24] That's true. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And Google images is not the place to go to make sure you have the right license. They do have a filter, I think, where you can license, but I would caution against just pulling anything random from Google images. Instead, go to sites that specialize in licensing photos or offer free licenses or whatever.

I do

Brian: [00:46:41] are some sites,

Brandon: [00:46:42] um, my GoTo tends to be Unsplash. Yep. Unsplash U N splash.com.

Brian: [00:46:47] It'll be on our show notes if you can't hear what we're talking about.

Brandon: [00:46:50] Yeah, I don't often need stock photos, but when I do, that tends to be my go to. There are certainly other ones out there that I'm just not as familiar with personally, but yeah, it's all free free license stuff. They encourage you to credit the photographer or to tip them or say thanks or whatever, but it's not required.

So yeah, I like that they kind of leave it up to you and there's some extreme, it's all extremely high quality images and some very niche stuff you can find there. You'd be surprised. You mentioned ads. I mean, that could be a whole discussion on its own, but I do think it's worth maybe going into that a little bit because it is such an integral part of social and years ago this wasn't the case, but we all know now for a business at least, social has become largely a pay to play game your content.

The more engaging it is, the better it will perform organically. But if you're running a business and you're using this to generate leads, it's probably worth investing a little bit of money into. And if it's worth investing money into, it's worth doing well to make sure you're not just throwing that money into the void.

And one thing we see with smaller companies is often just hitting the boost button on a post. It does make it very easy, but it also limits your targeting options. So I'm not saying that's a bad thing. That might be a great way to start and test it out. Cause you can just say, I want to spend $5 and I want to target people 18 and up in the United States.

Well imagine how far your $5 is not going to get you very far with a population of 320 million people or whatever. But you know, all that to say they do make it very easy to kind of dip your toe in the water and maybe put some money behind it. But a lot of times where a company like ours comes in, or just for people who know, that's not the most sound strategy.

They want to start putting more money into. Ads and they don't want to just keep hitting the boost button and tossing that money

Brian: [00:48:24] I like how political, like you're being so nice about this. Hitting the boost button is fucking stupid. It is such a waste of money. And like to me it's someone that's like. Well, I do paid advertising, but I don't want to figure it out, so I'm gonna hit boost. Like it's that person that doesn't want to actually do the work.

The boost button is there, so that. Facebook can take your money

Brandon: [00:48:42] Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. It's like a donate to Facebook

Brian: [00:48:45] it say this, the donate to Facebook button and it's there to either, maybe there's a strategy behind it. Maybe it's like, Hey, they're getting their feet wet and they want to learn more. So now they see you've spent money, they'll push you down.

They're like the funnel of actually getting into ads manager and learning that whole backend. But if you're going to do it, there's a couple of things. First of all, the donated Facebook button is not the one I would use the boost button.

Brandon: [00:49:05] They do have a little, a few more targeting off. I made it sound like you can only target based on age and country location. It does get a little more granular than that, but by and large, the Facebook ads manager, which you just mentioned, is that's where you want to be. It also can be really intimidating, you know?

And so this is opening a bit of a Pandora's box. And so that's why I didn't want to push people there right away. Because, yeah, if you set something up wrong, you could still waste a decent amount of money in there. And that tends to be where we step in and say, okay, we see what the need is. We see what your goals are.

We know you don't want to become an expert at this platform, so let us help you like target and really allocate your budget in an effective way. And that's not a pitch for my company by any means. It just goes to show like it takes a level of comfort and expertise. For anyone to not feel intimidated by it.

So it's okay if you go in there and you are intimidated, but Facebook has a lot of great resources and there's great YouTube videos. You know, if you want to get the basic knowledge, the tools are out there. It just takes time. Like anything.

Brian: [00:49:59] Well, just before we go into depth with this, I'm curious a couple of things. Are there any business types or anything that you've seen that ads just don't work

Brandon: [00:50:08] The interesting one for me is business to business. There are a lot of business business companies running very successful ads. So that's not saying it doesn't work, but I think there are some other hurdles involved. And I think that definitely requires some know-how behind the targeting that the average person just may be less comfortable with, because there's really no reason to have.

Brian: [00:50:29] And when you say business to business, you would be talking like the business HubSpot running ads to get someone like you or me to sign up for their account,

Brandon: [00:50:37] Yes, exactly. If you're targeting business owners or you're targeting someone with a specific title at a company, like only the chief marketing officer is going to care about whatever this is that just, you want to be more precise. You know, it's a little more of the scalpel approach as opposed to like the shotgun approach.

So when I first started doing ads, when we as a company really opened up that. Service to clients. That was the one that. It took me a little more time to make sure that I was doing well, because essentially people are trusting me with their money. So I'm spending other people's money. I want to do it well and provide a good result

Brian: [00:51:09] Just kind of terrifying.

Brandon: [00:51:10] It can be. Yeah. And now, I mean, we have, you know, client, literally client spending over $900,000 a month on Facebook ads like you, there's nobody on this who's listening to this. Most likely it's going to hit anywhere. They're going to at the most, you're going to shave a couple zeros off of that and still be far away from, from that.

And so. You can go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into that world, and the bigger your budget is, the more options you have with types of campaigns or any how many objectives you're running, how many people you hope see you're at, you know, all that

Brian: [00:51:38] let's, let's bring this back down to earth because,

Brandon: [00:51:40] just say that's a cause. To me, I

Brian: [00:51:42] can get big.

Brandon: [00:51:42] it can get really big, but again, I mentioned a minute ago, you can start with $1 a day, $5 a day.

I would recommend anyone who's uncomfortable with advertising or just getting their feet wet. There's no harm in doing that. There is no harm in testing it out at a very, very low level. And then learning and refining over time and upping your budget each day or each month as you start to see your results.

So we're working with a new client right now. It's a whiskey company. Ooh, thanks. So this coronavirus situation, they transitioned all of their manufacturing into hand sanitizer, and this is a cool story actually. So they decided to do this. They made a Facebook post about it, didn't advertise it or anything.

This was before I even knew who they were. They made a Facebook post about it. It went viral, like local news stations picked it up and all this stuff. They sold 10,000 units in the first week. On their eCommerce store. This is a whiskey company, so they can't sell whiskey on the eCommerce store, but all that to say their store, they've had any commerce store for 10 years, and in the first week of hand sanitizer, they outdid all 10 years of their sales history.

They sold more. I made more money in the first five days in the head in 10 years on all the other stuff they can sell. So they, they're like, Oh my gosh. Well, one, it crashed their website. They had to rebuild their web store and all this stuff. Then they came to us and said, okay. There's obviously demand here, and we need to create a system like we need, we need to keep making more, keeps selling more.

So we just finished the first few weeks of ads with them. They saw the results, they decided to up the budget by 50% and then two days later they upped it by another 25% so you start seeing results and you say, Oh, for every dollar I'm putting into this, I'm getting X number of people contacting me, or I'm making this much money.

You know, depending on your business model. And it makes it that much easier, too. Be comfortable with having a dedicated budget for that, right? So if you can make $3 for every dollar you spend, great. Maybe spend some more money. You can make $40 for every dollar you spend, just depending on how the is going.

And you see those results in real time. And so you say, Oh, I started with $1 a day. I don't want to try $5 a day. I want to try $10 and it just starts climbing from there. And then eventually you're the brand spending $925,000 in a month, you know? So anyway.

Brian: [00:53:42] It's like, what is that? Is that $30,000 a day or so?

Brandon: [00:53:45] Yeah. Right. Isn't it?

Brian: [00:53:48] yeah. 30,000 times 30 yeah.

Brandon: [00:53:50] Yeah. Mindblowing. Yeah. Yeah. Um,

Brian: [00:53:53] like that doesn't sound right.

Brandon: [00:53:54] it sounds because it's astronomical for their brands spending more than that, for sure. But for us, that's probably the highest we've ever been involved with. So when it comes to ads, you know, you might be thinking, Oh, so do I need to create something that looks as professional as my website?

Or does it

Brian: [00:54:10] obviously you need to hire a videographer, get them in your studio. You got to shoot a high production video of a tour,

Brandon: [00:54:15] I need to have a commercial for my studio. You know, he started thinking like, Oh, every advertisement I've seen in my whole life until maybe these past two years has been super produced, almost know TV quality or radio quality or whatever it might be, magazine quality. That's really not the case now.

And honestly, the ads that we're seeing perform the best right now are the ones that are the least produced that are literally just iPhone videos. When someone sees that come across, let's say their Instagram story feed, for example. You know, they've watched three of their friends stories that all look real time every day behind the scenes.

Someone baking sourdough or you know,

Brian: [00:54:50] I've been doing, if you've been following my stories, you've seen my sourdough it

Brandon: [00:54:53] doing their homework out, you know, or whatever you were doing these quarantine days or whatever. They've just watched three videos like that in a row. Now they get delivered to your ad. If your ad looks like just another one of their friends.

Video is something that you shot on your iPhone or is a little more real, you know, and less produced. This happens to me all the time now I'm like, when did I start following this person? And there is, Oh they got me. It's an ad, you know, but I've been watching it for 10 seconds. And anytime someone watches more than three seconds of your ad, you can retarget them.

You know? Now we know, we know Facebook's ad platform knows who they are and they've taken an action. They've watched a few seconds of a video you posted. Now you can hit him with a different type of ad cause you can re target that person.

Brian: [00:55:33] Just to clarify, like the reason that's good is because if they see that it is clearly an ad, which most Instagram story ads are clearly ads, they just look like ads. They just skip it instantly. They don't even care what the content is just out of principal and that's how I'm

Brandon: [00:55:48] they were overwhelmed,

Brian: [00:55:49] think about like when I'm reading a blog article on like some news site or whatever, like you know those little add modules between the blocks of texts that you're reading, your eyes just scans over those.

Have you ever actually stopped to look at an ad in the middle of an article.

Brandon: [00:56:01] Only if it's a brand I already care about.

Brian: [00:56:03] And even then, I don't even like I, I physically make my eyes not look at it like I, I'm like the worst person to

Brandon: [00:56:10] Yeah, I believe that.

Brian: [00:56:11] put, I put my best effort forward to avoid any advertising at all. And that's funny for coming from someone that advertises, but when someone actually catches me, like you're like, Oh, they got me.

Like I respect that. I'm like, Aw, damn. Nice. That's, that's great.

Brandon: [00:56:24] I do like that. And that's not to say we're not running any ads that aren't professional photographs or whatever, but I'd say, yeah, if you have the professional photograph, use that as an ad, but then also try running a video that you just recorded yourself and see which one performs

Brian: [00:56:37] Yeah, it's called split testing.

Brandon: [00:56:38] of course.

Brian: [00:56:39] can just test them against each other and see which one's more effective. And he did that for, what was the one? Was it the whiskey manufacturing one? You did the one where I, just a video of going down the

Brandon: [00:56:48] Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So the same whiskey brand I mentioned a minute ago, you know, they sent us just from their distillery or whatever, some behind the scenes videos of these whiskey bottles that are now filled with hand sanitizer going, you know, on the conveyor belt, getting a label slapped on them. Yeah.

Getting a cork put on top, you know, just the, all the machinery or whatever. So it's a very behind the scenes video. That's a one of just this bottle going down to the conveyor belt being spun around in a loop and a sticker label being slapped on it. That's the best performing a Facebook ad we have

Brian: [00:57:14] And this is just like a handheld iPhone,

Brandon: [00:57:16] Yeah, it was just, yeah. And I phoned from one of the guys that works at the factory, you know, and now we do have more professional photos running as well. And those are doing fine, but you just never know. And so I've been surprised like, Oh, the super low fi vertical iPhone video doesn't have any text overlay on it.

Nothing like that. That's driving people through the website and they're spending money, you know, on this stuff. So it's pretty cool. And so this is not to try to dissuade anyone like. As an advertiser and as someone who does professionally create content and hire photographers and work with videographers, there is still a lot of value in production, right.

But. So someone listening who might be thinking again, okay, I don't have the time to do this. I don't have the resources. I'm still working on building up my customer base and I'm not going to hire a content creator. That's okay. This is just encouraging you to take that first step and know that even companies who are advertising professionally, some of the best performing ads they have right now are something you could have done on your iPhone.

Brian: [00:58:09] Yup. I do want to point out anyone who's hearing this and is interested in getting the ads now, just make sure your website's up to snuff. Like if your website's already not performing ads early. To be amplifying that you have a leaky funnel and all those ad dollars are just leaking out of that funnel.

So make sure you're not, you're not just sending people to a bad landing page, it doesn't convert already. So make sure you're doing the things necessary. And some things I either teach in the profitable Brewster course, some I teach, we teach on past episodes of the podcast. We've had multiple episodes where you talked about a high converting website.

Make sure you're putting in the work before you spend the dollars because it's only going to be amplified by the ads, the worst converting traffic you'll find. It was going to be paid advertising, but that doesn't mean you can't make it profitable. And that's the whole key

Brandon: [00:58:53] can be insanely profitable actually.

Brian: [00:58:55] it's almost, and I talk about this all the time, this is a quote that I have quoted myself on, and then continuing to say over and over again, if you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.

And so almost the better you are at excluding people from clicking on your ad and coming to your site, it almost actually works better because then only the right people get to the bottom of your funnel. So this, this weird balancing of like making sure your website is not leaking out, but it's attracting the right people.

And it's almost a dichotomy of like trying to exclude certain. Make sure that the funnel slick and letting people slide through your funnel, that's not overly weird. Yeah, yeah. Crease it. You want to make sure it's really greasy, extra greasy, and, and lubed up for those people that you want at the bottom of your funnel, contacting you to actually work for you.

Brandon: [00:59:38] Yeah, that's true. If you're spending money on ads, like your ad needs to, first of all be leading people somewhere, right? It needs to have a URL attached to it. There needs to be a call to action, and wherever that link is sending people, make it look good, or at least make it represent your brand well or else just wait to spend the money, put the money in there, those resources towards getting your house in order first, right before you put it on the market.

Like that's kind of what it comes down to. Right. So ads are a whole fricking thing, you know? And, and we could probably do another chat on ad strategy specifically, but I hope that, you know, some of the things we talked about just might encourage people who I've been a little intimidated, you know, cause there are so many social media pros out there and they think, ah, I know my business needs to be on this and I just don't know how or I don't have the time.

It doesn't have to be the way that you see every other company do it. You can find a way that works for you. You can find a way to use the tools and resources you have. And not spend a lot of time and not have it be an ongoing project, you know? So just, it could be a good place to start.

Brian: [01:00:34] sweet. Well, as we wrap up here, man, anything else you want to leave our listeners with? What if there's a few listeners that are like running big studio operations? Let's just say Joe Wadsworth

Brandon: [01:00:43] true. I know we've been talking to, I keep assuming it's the small and medium sized, but there might,

Brian: [01:00:48] let me just say, what if those people want to hire media whisper to run their app, either their ads or their social media stuff, what would they do as next steps? Would you be interested in taking clients like that on,

Brandon: [01:00:57] For sure. Yeah. Especially on the paid side. You know, if you really want to kind of take that, those efforts from good to great, that's a lot of where I personally spend my time on. So there's a good chance we would actually be working together directly. We've got a media whisper.com that's media whisper.

Brian: [01:01:11] There will be a link to that in our show notes

Brandon: [01:01:13] Yeah. And we do have our own social media presence. It's funny cause I've been saying all this stuff, we did not have any social media presence for media whisper for years.

Brian: [01:01:22] I used to make fun of you for

Brandon: [01:01:23] Right. Despite being a social media agency and our whole philosophy as a company for the first. Eight years of being a company was that we weren't promoting ourselves like just like the name, you know, the whisper.

It was kind of like we were operating below the radar promoting our client's brands, and it really wasn't until about in the past year that we had employees who were passionate about kind of taking the torch and creating our own social media presence. So it's funny, you know, you might go and see that we don't have like tens of thousands of followers, but we're there too.

So you can find us at, at media whisper generally on any social media platform. Now. But the website is probably the best place to go to get a better sense of who we are, the types of clients we've worked with, and just some of our philosophy around how we do

Brian: [01:02:02] Sweet. Okay. All right, man. Well, thank you for coming on,

Brandon: [01:02:05] thanks for having me, man. I enjoyed it.

Brian: [01:02:06] if people have questions, they can either reach out to you via Instagram.

Brandon: [01:02:10] Yeah, I can find me at that. Brandon Brown. Yep.

Brian: [01:02:13] And then if they want you to hire your agency, they can go to a media whisper.com or find you on socialist.

Brandon: [01:02:17] Yeah, and my band is for India.

Brian: [01:02:20] There you go. Go give him some streams on

Brandon: [01:02:21] I got some, some few seconds here at Veridian, it's V. E. R. I. D. I a.

Brian: [01:02:30] So that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. Make sure you go out and thank Brandon for coming on this podcast. He runs a team of like 2025 people. Uh, he does a lot of work for his business and for him to take the time out of his day just to come and share some free knowledge with our audience is awesome of him to do.

So. Brandon, thank you so much. If you're listening back to this, I really appreciate that. And then our audience, make sure you reach out to him at. That Brandon Brown on Instagram and just let them know how helpful he was to you. Once you've set up your Instagram for success, and if you want to hire his agency to work for you, you should probably be making a decent amount of money from doing what you're doing already, but his agency does some awesome work, so be sure to reach out to media whisper by filling out the contact form on their website, media whisper.com until next time, thank you so much for listening and happy hustling.