Starring You: Leveraging Instagram for Premium Positioning
Admittedly, I didn’t even slow down.
She called my name and I ignored it because I thought, “That just can’t be for me.” When I realized she truly was talking to me, I almost did a happy dance right then and there. But that would have totally negated what just happened.
So the happy dance happened later when I was alone in my hotel room.
The first time I was stopped in an airport to have my picture taken with someone, I was blown away. And so ecstatic! And (I will admit), glad to have a witness. (See Figure 4–1, page 50, for the evidence!) Even though the witness was my driver for this particular speaking engagement, having a witness made the moment a little more scrumptious. Especially when he said, “Wow, I drove Rod Stewart’s wife last week, and no one recognized her.” (Rod Stewart’s wife, if you are reading this, no offense intended, of course.)
For me, this was a fan-freaking-tastic moment of giddiness.
Now to be fair, this spotting wasn’t random at all. It’s not like I was traveling with the kids to Disney when a super-fan stopped me. I’m pretty sure that level of notoriety will only happen if I accidently join an international spy ring or pyramid scheme when I thought I was just getting a really good price on Prada shoes. (“But, they were tweed, and they were beautiful,” I would say as the cuffs were placed.)
FIGURE 4–1. The First Time I Was Stopped at an Airport to Have My Picture Taken with Someone I Was Blown Away!
But no, there was no randomness about this “celebrity spotting.” I was in an airport at the conference destination where I would be speaking, for an organization that features me in their content and social media a lot. The person who spotted me knew me from those promotions.
So it’s not like this happens often, but that’s the whole point. To leverage celebrity, you don’t need to be famous worldwide. You only need to be a celebrity within the niche you serve. And that’s a whole lot more obtainable than achieving Justin Bieber stardom.
Obtaining celebrity status is not about an ego boost (although I’m not going to lie, that was nice too). Instead, it is about premium positioning so you are magnetic to your target market. Your perfect prospects will line up to see you, and they will pay you top dollar as the celebrity expert you are.
For example, you would expect to pay Jamie Oliver a lot more money to cook you dinner in your kitchen than you would a random chef you found on Thumbtack (www.thumbtack.com). No matter what your niche, celebrity positioning is a powerful tool to grow your tribe quickly and convert them into top-paying customers for life.
Before you embark on a path to stardom, it is important that you set yourself up for celebrity success. Your profile must be on-point with your brand before you begin promoting.
GETTING READY FOR YOUR CLOSE-UP
How are you coming across? If someone were to visit your social media pages and/or website without knowing you or speaking to you first, what would they think about you or your company? Would your brand messaging communicate what you want the visitor to know?
If you are like most, you have some ways to go to tweak your brand message to be clear to your target market. Don’t be ashamed. We all started with an embarrassing look at some point. Just pick up any People magazine and look at the “Who They Were Then” section to see a celeb’s awkward moments. It’s an issue for everybody, companies and individuals alike. There’s a reason I’ll never post a promo photo in a Throw Back Thursday #TBT post. And it isn’t because of my date.
Being embarrassed of what your brand looks like today isn’t reason to bury your head in the sand. You can develop celebrity positioning with just a few simple steps.
Get a Professional (and Recent) Headshot
This is the place to amp up your game and go beyond the selfie iPhone photo (ick!). Celebrities have good photos and so should you. To find an affordable one in your area, check out Thumbtack (www.Thumbtack.com). You can post the job there, and photographers will apply to take your photo, giving an estimate up front. You can get a good headshot for less than $100 using this service, and it goes a long way toward making you show up as a celeb.
And stop using that photo from 20 years ago, no matter how good you look in it! Those images are most likely hurting the trust factor with your prospects, as they look just as fake as a bad stock photo. (If you’ve done this, when you show up to your sales call, your prospect will feel like you started the relationship with a lie. Lying is lame, so get in the game with a current photo.)
You’re cute—now smile!
Hire a Pro to Create Your Lead Magnet Cover and Landing Page Featured in Your Bio
Yes, there are great free template services like www.Canva.com and www.Leadpages.net, but when it comes to your main marketing funnel, do yourself a favor and use a professional. Just like your website, they will help you to show up looking pretty and professional.
One great resource to try is www.Fiverr.com. For $5 you can hire a graphic designer to create a Lead Magnet cover for you. Spend the extra few bucks to have this done the right way!
Make the Camera Your BFF, Seriously
Any time a microphone or professional camera is in front of you for any reason, have someone take your picture. And then share those photos sporadically online. From when you speak on stage, to being interviewed for a podcast, to simply getting an award at your local chamber of congress, leverage these photos as blog images and post backgrounds.
Celebrities are photographed often, so you should share your media coverage online as though you were your own paparazzi. (Hold your silly-meter—no matter how cheesy this may feel to you, celebrity positioning goes a long way toward getting you paid more.)
Feature YOUR Content in Your Posts
If you got a spot on The Today Show, would you use it to promote someone else’s work? I sure hope not.
If you are sharing other people’s content on your page a majority of the time, stop. This is your opportunity to shine and set yourself up as an expert in your industry, so feature your content and develop your own images and posts. Start with your blog posts—are there images and quote nuggets you can pull out to run on your Instagram page? (See Figure 4–2 and 4–3, page 53, for examples from my content.)
If you don’t know where to start, begin by listing 12 questions your prospects tend to ask when you meet with them, and start by answering those. Turn them into image quotes and long-form comments on your Instagram feed.
Now it’s time to share your message with the world. And thankfully you don’t have to stand in line at 4 A.M. for 90 days in a row at The Today Show door to earn your publicity and celebrity status. (Although, if that’s your thing, have at it.) Instead, you can leverage the power of your Instagram marketing and entire marketing funnel to establish your stardom.
The steps are rather simple.
FIGURE 4–2. Feature Your Content in Your Posts—Not Other Peoples’.
FIGURE 4–3. Your Posts Are Your Opportunity to Shine—Make the Best Out of Them!
Start Small and Then Go Smaller
It’s easier to be well-known to everyone in a town of 5,000 than a city of 5 million, and you can’t be all things to all people. Pick a niche and then a niche within that niche. Focusing on a smaller target market will grow your celebrity quicker.
Pick your target market and then zero in on a small portion of the group/industry/subculture that you are focusing on, and stay focused on these individuals until you have achieved celebrity status. If you want to reach another subset of your audience, then once you have grown to celebrity status you can move on to the next niche.
Identify at least one group, association, or organization that serves your niche and make it your mission to dive deep and become a celebrity within it. Develop a relationship strategically and methodically with the organization that currently serves your niche market. This is a lot more effective than starting your niche from scratch, because you can leverage a group that has already brought members of that niche together.
Dive deep into getting to know the organization’s members and leadership. Find a way to volunteer, such as joining a committee or advisory board or working at an event. Follow the organization’s social media and begin to comment on its posts at least twice a week through your professional page. Make meaningful comments that show you actually read and connected with the content. (The worst thing you can do is post something meaningless and appear as Mr. Spam Man. No one wants that.)
And the next time you attend one of their events, use the Word Swag app to create posts from quotes you hear at the event, and post them on your page while tagging the other brand. See my example in Figure 4–4.
FIGURE 4–4. Featuring Someone Else’s Content Is OK to Do Sometimes If It’s Done with a Purpose and You Give It Proper Attribution.
The secret to getting in good is giving first and asking second. Even though this is in contrast to the recommendation I made earlier in this chapter—that you should feature all of your own content—this time it’s done strategically and with purpose.
Keep the ratio at four posts of yours to one post of theirs, and you will be in great shape. Only use this strategy when you are aligning with an industry leader.
Give Social Clout Before You Ask for Anything
Post a couple of times a month tagging the other organization (meaning, use the @ symbol and list its social media username). This will not only distribute your post to more people (Instagram may show your post to some of its fans who aren’t yours), it will also alert the organization that you mentioned it. If you take time to curate the content (meaning, you add commentary or questions to your post), it will begin to demonstrate how you are an expert in the subject matter. This helps to build a relationship with the organization and position you as an authority in your niche.
Leverage the Bazookas out of Photos
Celebrities are photographed often and so should you be. This means attending events in your niche, and going to meet-and-greets and having your photo taken with as many well-known speakers, leaders, or actual celebrities (depending on the event), as possible. You may feel like a complete tool for doing this, but this strategy is pure gold when it comes to positioning. Post these photos one at a time on your social media and tag the other person. This also means showing up to events well dressed and informed—meaning you know who the VIPs are, and you can talk to them intelligently about their work. Thanks to social media, this task has never been easier. Don’t be lazy pants. Instead, do a little research before you show up. Others in the crowd won’t bother, and this will help you get a little extra chat time with the VIP.
I did this at an event with Nido Qubein, president of High Point University, and was able to score a review and testimonial for the book I was writing at the time. (I was nervous to approach him, but the payoff was so worth it.) Live boldly, and you too can access thought leaders in your niche.
Feature Celebrities in Your Content
After you give value and develop a relationship with the previously mentioned celebrities, request to interview one of their key leaders who is well known within your niche and post it to your blog. Create valuable content to open and close the piece and well-designed social media posts to promote it. This will help to further build your relationship with the organization and establish your authority positioning with its members. You can then create Instagram posts using the celebrity’s quotes and tag him or her in the image.
Get in the Spotlight
Well-known publications feature celebrities on the cover as a way to sell the magazine. It’s time you were featured as well. After you have followed the steps above, seek guest blogging or guest columnist opportunities from the organization. Write content that is thoughtful and valuable, not self-promotional, and that meets the publication’s requirements. (If you are unsure about word count or rules about picture inclusion, ask.) Once the article is published, promote it like your celebrity status and future autograph requests depend on it. First, give yourself a high five, and then, pull out quotes from the articles, turn them into Instagram post images, and tag the publication’s Instagram account.
Once you have accomplished all we have just covered, the secret is to stay consistent—as in, don’t give up! Continue to tag, post, photograph, interview, and guest post. Repetition is the key to establishing authority/celebrity/expert status. It generally takes me about one year to 18 months to conquer a niche. That may seem long, but the payoff could not be more worth it. A year of hustle for a whole lifetime of expert positioning and premium pricing? Yes, please!
CASE STUDY: GROWING AND MONETIZING YOUR INSTAGRAM MARKETING WITH ANTHONY CARBONE OF WWW.WOLFMILLIONAIRE.COM
Anthony Carbone has grown his Instagram accounts to 14 million followers over the past two years and currently earns six figures annually through Instagram ad revenue. He teaches others how to grow their followers and make money through Instagram at www.WolfMillionaire.com.
Anthony, your story is incredibly fascinating. Tell us about how you got into the field of Instagram list growth and monetization.
Carbone: I’m 38 years old and a computer engineer by education. I have a huge interest and passion in the automotive industry and created a hobby site about ten years ago called www.MadWhips.com—a photo-sharing social network, like Pinterest and Instagram, but just for exotic cars. I’d worked a stable corporate job for most of my life, though, spending nine years with a major corporation. I left that company a couple years ago to work for a small private company in the digital advertising space.
Shortly after I left my super-stable, comfortable corporate job for this smaller company, the new business laid me off as part of a company restructure. This was the first time in my life I was ever fired. Kim, I don’t get fired! While I’m not an A-student, I’m that C-student who works his butt off for every grade, every dollar, and anything I’ve ever had in life. So it was pretty flooring to just simply get laid off.
That prompted me to take a good look at my life and what I was doing. After excelling online with MadWhips, and playing with Facebook and Twitter in the past, I had fallen behind on social media as I’d gotten older. Once I got fired, I started looking around and I decided for the first time in my life that I would do something 100-percent entrepreneurial.
I actually started to look for a couple jobs but couldn’t find anything I really wanted to do, that married my passion for cars and technology and advertising. Again I started to look at the whole MadWhips equation, and I started to play with Instagram. I sold both the vehicles I owned at the time and had a little bit of money to get by for a couple months—hoping that things would turn around. I hired two developers who basically redesigned www.MadWhips.com, introducing an iOS app and an Android app.
While my team did that, I went to town playing with social networks, to see how I could growth-hack people’s interest in joining and contributing to my website. At that time I had one account with 700 followers. That was my main @MadWhips account. It was very amateur. I posted just for the sake of posting because it was a new social network, and it didn’t take me long to figure out the Instagram game.
I noticed what was going on with the larger accounts out there—especially in the exotic car niche—and saw the biggest car accounts (the ones with 100,000 to 150,000 followers) were charging $5 at the time to promote your Instagram account. So I thought, what better way to kick start my brand while the guys are recoding and relaunching the MadWhips website. I spent six or seven months growing the @MadWhips Instagram account.
In four months I took that one account from 700 followers and grew it to 100,000 by paying larger accounts to promote it. I quickly saw how much money was out there and how fast those other accounts were growing . . . simply by helping other smaller accounts like mine grow their following.
This was a little over two years ago. When I saw that, I thought, “Well, there’s a huge demand.” The exotic car niche on Instagram was by far the largest at the time—larger than travel, larger even than sports. At the time it was even larger than fashion and cosmetics, which are now the dominant forces on Instagram.
Even so, all the people I dealt with who helped me grow my accounts were amateurs. Given that I had corporate experience and a sales and marketing background, I figured I could spend time trading multiple accounts and running this Instagram game, charging other people for my help in growing their accounts just like I had been paying other people to grow my own.
These same accounts were also selling advertising space for stuff that would target the male demographic, not necessarily just automotive enthusiasts, but the male demographic who would follow these types of car accounts.
So within the span of the first four months of growing my @MadWhips account to 100,000 followers, I started a couple other accounts just to experiment. I literally bomb-tested Instagram to see how far I could push the different ways to grow an account, which resulted in a couple of my accounts getting blocked and banned.
When I did figure it out, I was able to very quickly grow a couple major accounts—@ Exotic_Performance—to 2.7 million followers. At the end of my first year playing on Instagram, I had created about 18 Instagram accounts with 5.4 million followers.
Wow!
Carbone: At that point, I was able to recoup the money I’d spent growing my initial account and was making about $5,000 a month, simply by providing the same service I’d paid others for. I shouted out other smaller accounts who wanted to grow their fan base. At the same time I was also promoting products.
In that first year, about eight months into the Instagram game, I launched my own e-commerce store selling carbon-fiber phone cases, because I saw how many people were successfully selling all different kinds of phone cases. There were a couple companies selling knock-off automotive cases and being taken down by the major companies, so I launched a carbon-fiber product for the iPhone and Android phone and I started to sell this online.
In the first month of launch, I did about $7,000 in sales, which showed me there was a huge market and high conversion rate for people following my Instagram accounts who wanted to buy phone accessories or automotive-related products.
That was my first year playing with Instagram. When we ultimately relaunched www.MadWhips.com I had a very healthy Instagram following. It was an easy fit for me to then ask my users—who all wanted to have their photos posted on my Instagram accounts—that if they wanted me to feature their photos, they had to upload them to www.MadWhips.com, no longer just a hobby site but now my fulltime employment, in conjunction with the Instagram piece.
I actually have seven co-op students running my Instagram network now—I’ll get to that in a second—but I hired my very first co-op intern after I grew my Instagram network to 18 accounts and 5.4 million followers.
I worked from my couch for about three months, and we finally got accepted into Canada’s largest business incubator, the DMZ at Ryerson University, right downtown in Yonge-Dundas Square. Super cool. From there I received specific business venturing advice from the entrepreneurs who are part of that space, and I was able to quickly scale my company from just me and one employee up to seven interns.
So now I employ seven co-op students every semester who basically run my network of Instagram accounts, which I’ve now grown to over 30 accounts with 18-plus million Instagram followers. And our team basically sources all the photos from www.MadWhips.com. We’re an automotive-based social network for photography enthusiasts, so we have an unlimited draw of photos flowing into www.MadWhips.com, which is same-day content that we get to feature from all over the world on our 30 Instagram accounts.
We post close to 220 photos a day across my network, all exotic car photography, all giving credit and promoting the amateur or professional photographer who contributed the photo. On top of that, I have a handful of clients in the non-automotive space who I help promote and help them gain awareness through caption advertising or photo or video advertising on the myriad of accounts that I have.
Can you give us some strategies on how to grow an Instagram following?
Carbone: Content is still king and on a social network that’s photography- or video-based like Instagram, I can’t repeat enough how important it is to share high-quality, unique content.
Now, not everybody can go out and start creating sure-fire awesome content that other people want to consume, but if you’re a brand or a business, it’s imperative that you keep your eye and focus on the type of content you’re putting out there. You want to give a glimpse or a background view of your company or products or personnel, to allow others who want to engage with your brand to consume that media.
So, whether you’re creating it yourself or curating someone else’s, the number-one thing you need to remember is to always give proper credit. That’s the biggest thing that I see people don’t do.
And they also don’t realize how important of a strategy it is, not only to give credit so you don’t infringe copyright (which may cause your page to be disabled by Instagram), but by engaging and tagging and giving credit to the actual photo or video owners, it is likely they will like and comment on your photo, because it’s a big compliment to them. If you can use someone else’s photo and tag them and they thank you and like it, that’s going to go a long way in making sure Instagram awards your page favorability.
Can you give an example of what a caption might include if you’re posting somebody else’s picture?
Carbone: The general consensus or standard is to put, “Photo by:” and then list the person’s username. A lot of people confuse photo credits with citing the page where they found the photo or video versus giving credit to the actual owner. There are many pages out there that just regurgitate content from other accounts, and the proper photo credits get lost in transition. That’s the biggest mistake people make. In the long run, giving proper credit will help your post go further in [Instagram’s] Explore page, getting you more likes and thus attracting more followers.
How about another strategy?
Carbone: Hashtags. There are between 500 and 600 million Instagram users in the world, so the number of hashtags is abundant. It’s important to use targeted hashtags that really fit with the content you’re posting. Don’t use irrelevant hashtags—especially spammy ones like #follow-for-follow or #like-for-like.
If you were to post a photo of a red apple, instead of using the “#red” and “#apple,” you’re better off using a hashtag that’s two words “#redapple,” because it’s more targeted to the photo you’re posting and thus more likely someone who’s looking at the hashtag called “#redapple” will stumble upon your page. If you instead use hashtags like “#red” and “#apple,” because there are so many of those hashtags out there, your content’s just going to get lost. No one’s going to discover it. I call these two-word hashtags “long-tail hashtags” because they’re very specific, and it’ll help you in the long run to really attract the right people to discover your content.
Would you still recommend people use paid shoutouts to grow their accounts? And if so, how would someone find accounts that offer this service?
Carbone: While it’s not required to pay other accounts to grow, it’s the brute force method. If you really want to jump-start and accelerate the growth of your brand new account—especially if you have an offering or a product—then it not only helps you attract new followers but gets your voice out there quickly in the marketplace. From there I would do a lot of research. You need to identify your target audience, find out where that audience is and what other pages they follow, and then find the bigger pages among them—whether they’re fan accounts of conglomerate postings in a high-level niche, or from specific influencers. An influencer is someone who has a personal brand online with a large amount of followers. You can reach out to them and say, “Hey, I’ve got this brand or this page I’d like to grow. What does it cost for you to promote it and what does that look like?”
Perhaps you’ll give them a caption to be cut and pasted into one of their posts, or perhaps they’ll write something clever that’s in line with your caption and brand. But the first step is to identify who your audience is that you want to target and locate the large accounts and influencers.
Obviously pricing is going to vary, so you want to reach out to at least ten or 20 accounts in your niche, if you can, and ask people what their pricing is for advertising your account. A lot of them will be open to that. Some accounts might not, but for the most part anyone who has an account with an email in their bio or a little message in their bio that says, “DM for shoutouts,” or “DM for business,” it means they’re definitely open to your request.
That’s awesome. So once you are growing your follower base, you have found it’s not only good for building your business, but your Instagram page can become a business in itself. Can you talk about how someone might make the transition when they think they’re ready to start monetizing their page?
Carbone: The biggest thing I always like to reiterate is that every page, every niche, is going to grow differently. If you have a high-level account, like @exoticcars, you’re going to appeal to a wide range demographic, predominantly male, versus if you had a more narrowly focused page like a BMW page or a specific model of BMW page. This will nail down the size of audience you can target. You have to remember that an account with 100,000 followers in a big niche is pretty much the same as an account with 10,000 followers in a tight niche.
In order to grow your account and monetize it, you really need to understand how engaged your followers are, what type of audience you have, and, most importantly, make sure the product or service you want to sell or advertise is something they’re going to want to buy.
Instagram is a huge, huge, huge marketplace. I would almost argue that it’s a billion-dollar marketplace where money is exchanged for service, products, reviews, and shoutouts. The biggest thing you need to understand is that fine balance of starting to advertise on your account—whether it’s for yourself or someone else—and how hard to push it. It really all depends on how long your account’s been out there, and the frequency of your posting.
If you’re just starting out, then I suggest—whether you’re a brand, a personal influencer, or anything—that you don’t really push a hard sell until you have a meaty following. [And again, what constitutes a meaty following is going to depend on the scope of your niche. If you have a really high-level niche, then you might want to wait until you have 50,000 to 100,000 followers, whereas if you have a very specific niche you can start monetizing at 5,000 to 10,000 followers because you know that the people following your account are there for the specific reason that your niche services.]
When do you recommend adding a product into the mix?
Carbone: For me, I saw a lot of people in my space advertising phone cases, which meant there was a healthy marketplace for it. I did my research and crunched the numbers to find that because I had this massive following, my margin retainment would be fairly high, simply because I didn’t have to pay for the advertising. So when you have a following base you can sell to, you can also start selling third-party affiliate offers—if it matches with your brand and your audience. Or if there’s some sort of accessory you can test your market on that doesn’t require a lot of capital outlay, then I’d suggest you test it out. It’s really up to you.
But first you have to grow a bit of a following, validate that your following has a need for the product, and then test it out to see if there are sales. If there are, you can then scale the offer because you can basically go after those bigger accounts you’ve either identified as an influencer or a page in your niche and pay them to advertise your product.
So now you are not only selling a product directly through your Instagram page, but you’re doing it through others as well. Again, crunch the numbers and make sure the cost versus margin ratio makes sense for what you’re selling.
So what are some of the mistakes you see businesses make as they try to grow their following and/or monetize it?
Carbone: The biggest one is not keeping the account 100-percent business. The brand needs to exist on its own as a business or as a product. A lot of people will kind of blend their home/family life with their business account. And while that might be fine in terms of showing that you’re human—that there’s a person behind the brand—the quality of those photos frequently doesn’t match up with the page’s brand image.
I find it detrimental to the brand when you post something that’s not really related. A lot of people really, really miss that mark. So if you’re growing a company page on Instagram, whether it’s a small business or a big business, just start out keeping it all about the business, your products, your services. Keep the home and family life out of it, unless of course you’re selling a service that directly correlates to those images or the human element of it. If it doesn’t, then just keep it strictly business.
One of your students, Tim Sykes, has a lifestyle guide he gives as part of his business. So for him it makes sense to showcase his lifestyle. But if somebody’s going to focus specifically on paddleboards, let’s say, they should just promote the paddleboard. It’s not about them; it’s about the product. I guess it matters what niche is your focus.
Carbone: Yeah, and again, content is king. So we can take awesome product shots of our paddleboards. If you’re going to use a photo of you using the paddleboard, it needs to be inspirational. It needs to be very, very well curated. It doesn’t have to be DSLR-quality, though. You don’t have to hire a photographer or a DOP to do this. It just takes a little bit of trial and effort with your standard smartphone to create truly beautiful photos that amplify and highlight your brand. This is where a lot of people miss the mark—taking the proper photos. It’s a bit of an art, but it’s very addictive and can be learned quickly.
If folks want to find out more about you, or how they can learn from you about Instagram, where should they go?
Carbone: Visit www.WolfMillionaire.com. Readers can download my free 20-page Instagram Guide. It’s filled with tips, tricks, and strategies you can use right away to start growing your account faster, lock it down so that it’s secure, and see better engagement.
#INSTAGRAMFORBUSINESS POSTABLES
Positioning yourself as a key expert drives prospects to come to you and gives you the leverage to get paid what you are really worth, which of course is a lot. #InstagramforBusiness
Get ready for your close-up—the payout is marvelous. #InstagramforBusiness
Find out how Anthony Carbone created his celebrity brand using his Instagram account. #InstagramforBusiness
Being embarrassed about what your brand looks like today isn’t reason to bury your head in the sand. Take action. #InstagramforBusiness
You’re cute—now smile! #InstagramforBusiness
Give social clout before you ask for anything #InstagramforBusiness
Resource spotlight: Visit www.UGIGbook.com for “12 Ways to Pose to Improve Your Photos.”