Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

robert
[00:00:06]
Hey eCommerce marketing podcast list. Now I wanted to let you know that we have created 16 eCommerce marketing videos for you. You can download these free videos by visiting eCommerce marketing podcast.com/videos are by texting the word videos to plus 1 4 8 0 4 1 8 1 4 1 11. This step by step video marketing tutorials will teach you how to drive more traffic to your eCommerce website. How to get more back links to your eCommerce website and how to optimize your website to get more paid customers. Get the videos right now by visiting eCommerce marketing podcast.com/videos or by texting videos to plus 1 4 8 0 4 1 8 1 4 1 1. Welcome to the eCommerce marketing podcast. Today’s guest is Ross Simmons. Ross is the founder of foundation. It’s a content consulting and creation company. He’s also the found co-founder of hustle and grind, and that’s a subscription service for entrepreneurs for coffee. And he’s also a founder for create a content marketing software that he’s working on right now. Welcome to the e-commerce marketing podcast, Ross, how are you doing

Ross
[00:01:24]
Very well. Thanks so much for having me. I’m looking forward to chatting with you about marketing and digital strategies for e-commerce companies.

robert
[00:01:31]
Yeah, so we’ll be talking, today’s talk. Focus is going to be Instagram marketing. You have written a, you’ve done a lot of work on Instagram marketing. You also use it for your company, the hustle and grind coffee, subscription service. So if you can just give us a beef, a small background about that company and what kind of results you got using Instagram.

Ross
[00:01:56]
Definitely. So Instagram marketing for us started as an experiment. I like to do experiments every once in a while with different channels. I’ve done experiments with slide share, where I’ve been able to recently crack over 1.2 million views. And this past year, one of our experiments was with Instagram. It was a channel that I always had interest in. I created a deck all about Instagram, probably in 2013, and I always knew that it was an interesting channel, but it wasn’t what I really dived into most recently. I kind of invested some significant amount of time with hustle and grind, which is my coffee subscription company, me and my co-founder invested a lot of time in trying understand this platform. We’ve been able to grow our channel to 75,000 people all over the world. Since then through my consultancy foundation, we’ve worked with brands and helped them grow their Instagram following to over 200,500,000 followers.

Ross
[00:02:42]
And there’s a lot of different tactics and strategies that we’ve kind of used along the way that really demonstrate how this is a channel that is still being under utilized. But it’s definitely a channel that I think can drive some meaningful result. When you look at the overall kind of digital marketing landscape, Instagram marketing is still just content marketing. The only difference is that it’s not happening in a feed like Twitter. It’s not happening through a blog, it’s happening through visuals and it’s visual marketing one on one. So it’s a channel that I think is still very new, but it’s a channel that is a great opportunity for eCommerce businesses to who are looking to kind of tell their story in an effective way.

robert
[00:03:18]
And you mentioned that you’ve used Instagram to market hassle and grind the coffee subscription service. So what kind of results did you, did you get from that?

Ross
[00:03:28]
It’s been great. So we have customers all over the world. Thanks to Instagram. We’ve been able to take those 75,000 followers and convert them into newsletter subscribers, who we’ve been able to kind of use email marketing as a way to kind of keep them engaged with our eCommerce products. So not only do we sell coffee subscriptions, we also also sell posters. We sell t-shirts, we sell coffee mugs, we sell variety variety of one off products. And what Instagram has allowed us to do, it’s allowed us to kind of put up a picture of a t-shirt and then tell people to click the link in our bio to download, to order this t-shirt they’re then clicking the link in our bio and they’re ordering. And what we tend to see is a conversion rate between clicks and actual acquisition to nearly, probably both 30%. So the number of people who actually click directly from Instagram and go to our website, if we have a call to action up about a product of some sort, they tend to convert, which is very interesting.

Ross
[00:04:21]
In the early days before Instagram allowed you to actually do advertising. This was the primary way to really kind of convert leads and turn them into customers. So we were into it very early on where we were pushing and telling people to click the link at our bios buyer products, buy our t-shirts download a new ebook from us order our content. And we found that the conversion rates on this platform are higher than they’re on Twitter, higher than they’re on Facebook, especially when we talk about organic content. So on Facebook, if you put up a post and it’s organic, meaning you just share it. And it’s there. The amount of conversions that you get from our experience has been very low, lower than say, 5% on Instagram. The click through rate is just through the roof. We, we can put up a post for example, saying, join our newsletter. And we would see anywhere from 200 people, sign up for a newsletter with one single post and that’s organic and it’s not paid, which is interesting. We don’t actually pay to put up that post. We just design it, press upload, and then it’s done. So I think that Instagram, when you can grow your channel to a significant number, it becomes a mini network on its own within your following.

robert
[00:05:28]
Okay. And we, what, what’s the type of audience or who are the users in Instagram? Is there a certain demographic that tends to go towards Instagram? The reason I’m asking about that is because a couple of weeks ago I was talking to my nephew. He is 14 is going to be turning 14. And I was like, okay, what social networks are you on that we can connect? And, you know, just communicate to make it faster. And I say that you’re on Facebook since I use Facebook, I’m heavily on Facebook. And he said, no, I’m on Instagram and Snapchat. And you know, that made me sign up for Snapchat. I, I really use Snapchat. And then I, I sent him my text just joking saying, Hey, okay, so now signed up to Snapchat. Okay. Can you send me instructions on how to use this platform? So

Ross
[00:06:19]
Yeah, so the majority of the users on Instagram are between the ages of 25 and 34. So you’re hitting a, a younger demographic once you, the second, most popular is 18 to 24. So it is skewing relatively young under the 35 range. And then when you go 35 and plus it’s a very small portion of the overall Instagram audience. So you are targeting a younger demographic, but what’s interesting about it is that it’s a channel being used by all walks of life. So somebody who’s 34 for instance, is in a different state of mind than somebody who’s 25, but they’re both using Instagram, which makes it very interesting because that 34 year old might have kids that 25 year old is probably just trying to figure out where they’re gonna go out on a Friday night. So it’s a very distinct group, but it’s still skewing younger if you consider 35 and under to be young.

robert
[00:07:05]
Okay. And so what are some of the ways that eCommerce businesses can use Instagram to get more traffic, get more customers than sales?

Ross
[00:07:14]
So there’s three tactics. One of them is very straightforward and I think all of your audience can figure this one on, on their own. And that’s advertising. Like if you wanna drive traffic to your Instagram account, you can go to Facebook, use their ads manager and you can promote your Instagram account. And that’s an easy way to kind of grow your account. But there’s another way that is less talked about, but just as powerful, if not more powerful and that’s show note. So a show note is when you get another account, somebody who has similar amount of followers, or hopefully fingers crossed more followers than you, and you get them to put up a post and say something like just found this post from, at hustle and grind, love this post great account, check them out by them, pushing out that content, their followers, then see it.

Ross
[00:07:56]
They can decide if they like the post that they just shared. And then they’ll follow your account as a result. This is something that brands, eCommerce companies have used significantly and been able to generate some significant results. If you look at Frank body, which is a huge e-commerce system, I think they’re doing nearly, I think maybe I heard that they were doing about 1 million in revenue this year. They were able to capitalize on show notes through Instagram and grow their account to the millions. The way that they were able to do it was very straightforward. They reached out to some influencers who had significant followings. They sent them free product and they told them to take a picture and they give a show to their Instagram account. If you can do that, you’ll get more people taking photos with your product giving you love, and then ultimately having their followers then follow you.

Ross
[00:08:43]
It’s a great approach. It’s influencer marketing 1 0 1 by leveraging show notes is a huge approach. And one that I strongly recommend, I wrote a blog post and I’ll send it to you so you can link to it in the show notes. And it’s called how to go from zero to 20,000 followers on Instagram, real frigging quick. And what it’s all about is understanding that there’s different types of show notes that you can do to generate a following. And I strongly recommend that your listeners check out that blog post it’s very in depth, and it can provide a lot of insight around this idea of show notes and influencer marketing. I think it’s one of the best opportunities on Instagram. And I really think anybody in the eCommerce space should be paying attention. And then finally, the third type of approach for generating followers on Instagram is compelling content.

Ross
[00:09:25]
You wanna share great product shots. You wanna share content that connects with people on an emotional level and that they would resonate with. And on top of that, you should consider understanding that Instagram is a very emotional channel. It’s a channel where people don’t come just to follow brands. They’re coming to Instagram to see what their friends are doing, to see what their peers are doing. Maybe see what celebrities are doing, and it’s an emotional kind of channel. So if you’re putting up a post on Instagram, you can kind of leverage that fact that it’s a relationship driven network and tell people to tag their friends. So if you put up a post and you’re like, who made 2016, a great year for you tag them below, they’re gonna start tagging their friends. Their friends are then gonna see your post, and then they’re gonna follow you on Instagram as well. So it in it generates this opportunity where you can kind of start to build your following that way. Or if you sell a product, put it up on Instagram and then say, tag, the friend who you think would love these shoes or tag the friend you think would love this. T-shirt that kind of thing goes extremely, does extremely well on Instagram and can really drive some significant results in building that following.

robert
[01:10:26]
Okay. So you say there’s three things you started with the shout out. You also mentioned the content marketing. What was the second

Ross
[01:10:34]
Method advertising? So advertising through Facebook ads manager, setting up ads and driving people to your Instagram account. Okay.

robert
[01:10:43]
Already, I stumbled upon that article that you mentioned that I will link up in the show notes to that one article. You talked about getting followers on Instagram, but in that article, you also mentioned a lesson you learned after you tried to send out the, your coffee subscription to some, some of the influences. Can you talk about that a little

Ross
[01:11:05]
Bit? Definitely. So the lesson that we learned is you want to ensure that the person who you’re gonna send the content to is knows two things. One they’re aware that you’re gonna send it to them. And two, they know that there’s an expectation that you’re, they’re gonna share it on their Instagram account. Once they received that product, we were sending a product to influencers without actually letting them know that we were sending it, but also made the mistake of sending them product without saying, Hey, would you mind taking a photo with our product? So a lot of people were able to get coffee, but they didn’t do anything with it. They didn’t take a photo. They didn’t upload it to Instagram, nothing happened as a result. So the one thing I would investigate and make sure that you do when you’re going about this approach is to ensure that you’re reaching out to these influencers beforehand and you lay out specific requirements that you’re looking for, let them know that you want them to put up a post on Instagram, on Twitter, on Facebook and let them know that you want them to kind of tell the story and tag you in that content.

Ross
[01:11:57]
Once you do that, though, you have to recognize that you are opening yourself up to an opportunity where they’ll say, okay, I’ll do all of this, but I also wanna be compensated. And in those situations, you’ll have to negotiate a fee, which again can be anywhere from $10 to $20,000, depending on who you’re going after.

robert
[01:12:14]
Okay. Thanks for elaborating on that at the top mistakes you’ve seen people make in Instagram. Yeah.

Ross
[01:12:22]
So one of the biggest mistakes that I see a lot of people do on Instagram is when they share a post, they go crazy with their hashtags and don’t get me wrong. When it comes to hashtags on Instagram, hashtags are a very important channel, are a very important tactic in the marketing mix. As it relates to Instagram as a whole hashtags allow you to be discovered easily. But what I recommend is instead of putting up your hashtags in your caption and hashtag every other word, you’re gonna put up your posts. You’re gonna use a caption. That’s very intriguing. Something that might say, check out this post. These are our latest shoes, click the link in our bio. Regardless, you put that post up. You don’t put any hashtags in it as well. What I want you to do is then comment on your post comment on the exact post that you just shared and include all of the hashtags there.

Ross
[01:13:03]
So take like a block of hashtags up to 20 different ones and comment with them that way, when somebody’s seeing your post in their newsfeed, they’re not thinking, oh, this person is a scammer. This person’s trying to kind of scam the system and just stuff, a bunch of hashtags, they solely see the caption. And then as more people start to comment on your post, those hashtags will disappear. So that’s one recommendation that I would make for sure. It’s a huge mistake that people make. You don’t wanna look like a spamer on Instagram. So comment with your hashtags instead of including them in that primary caption.

robert
[01:13:31]
Yeah. That’s a very sneaky way of adding those hashtags into the post. It is, I don’t know how many people are using it, but I’m glad you mentioned that. And you shared that. Is there another mistake or other mistakes you’ve seen people make when they’re trying to market on Instagram? Yeah.

Ross
[01:13:47]
I think one other mistake that people do is they think of Instagram as a one way channel, right? Like they think of it as a billboard. Let’s put up a message. Let’s scream at people and let them go from there. So they put up their post, they walk away from their phone. They don’t come back. I think that what you need to do is understand that Instagram again is used for social conversation. So if you put up a post and people are commenting, you should respond back to them, reply back, say, thanks for your comment. Send them an emoji. Something as simple as that. And also don’t be afraid to go into discover and search on Instagram. Find people who are sharing pictures of your product, sharing things that are interesting to you and commenting on their photos. For example, with how someone grind. We’re a motivational brand.

Ross
[01:14:26]
We are focused on people who are entrepreneurs, who are go getters. So we’ll look at the hashtag rise and grind. We’ll see what people are using that hashtag for. If they’re taking a picture of their computer, if they’re taking a picture of them at the office, even in the gym and we’ll comment, and we’ll just say simple, something simple, like you’ve got this or how so now shine later, or we’ll send them emoji with the fire, something like that. And they love it. People connect with it because they say, oh, this brand is not just a regular brand. That’s just pushing out their content. They’re actually trying to have a meaningful conversation and interaction with me.

robert
[01:14:58]
Okay. How can you tell your success when you are dealing with Instagram? I guess some types of analytics you should be looking at, or some numbers you need to be setting as your goal. And you’re using this channel for marketing.

Ross
[01:15:12]
One of the, there’s the simple approach. If you’re using advertising, you definitely wanna use Facebook’s ad manager and their analytic system, but there’s a few channels in particular that I use a lot and their dash Hudson and simply measured. So dash Hudson is a full suite, Instagram marketing and management system that allows you to schedule your content, allows you to track when people are mentioning your brand, it allows you to compare yourself to others. And what’s great about it is it puts it all in one dashboard. Simply measured is great because it delivers reports. So you can sign up for simply measured. You can plug in your Instagram account and it will give you reports around your following engagement, proposed, things like that. What’s very cool about dash Hudson is that it shows you also the influencers that are following you. So let’s say for example, you’ve built up your following to 10,000.

Ross
[01:15:57]
You don’t have time to go through those 10,000 users and find out who they are, but with dash Hudson, it will show you exactly who’s following you. What they look like, where they’re from, what type of following they have. And it will also show you if they’re mentioning you. So for us, one of our biggest strategies is that show, note approach that we talked about. We reach out to accounts. We reach out to influencers and we get them to give us show notes on their accounts with dash Hudson. We can see when those influencers are making their show notes and we can see a direct relationship between the show and the number of followers that we get as a result. So instead of us guessing and thinking, oh, everybody’s going to generate us followers. We can actually use this platform to track and see who’s actually giving us show notes. That’s actually generating results for us.

robert
[01:16:40]
Okay. And other than Instagram, what’s another successful digital marketing strategy you’re using to promote hustle and grind.

Ross
[01:16:50]
So with hustle and grind, we’re doing a lot of different things, but I’d say one of the other pieces that are been very successful for us is a combination of content curation and content creation. Now, I like to call it the Netflix approach. So you look at Netflix and the way that they’ve been able to build their empire is they’ve been able to go out and find some of the best content from all over the world. They’re finding things from the UK. They’re finding content from the us. They’re finding content from Canada, that movie producers and TV producers are creating. And then they’re curating that content into their platform. They’re taking all of this content and they’re giving it to people who are subscribed to their channels, who wanna see it on top of that, they’re creating their own content like host of carts. What we’ve done is we’ve taken a similar approach.

Ross
[01:17:34]
So we curate content on a regular basis with things like our newsletter and on our blog. And on Twitter, we use shameless blog, get crate.co to kind of curate content that we can share on our social media channels. And then we just distribute this content through our newsletter, through our blog, through our Instagram account, and also through our social media networks on top of that, we create content. So we’re creating our own eBooks. We’re creating our own blog posts. We’re creating slide shares. We’re creating a variety of different content. So it’s the Netflix approach. As in, we’re not only using the own assets, the content that we can produce, but we’re also taking content from others through guest blogging, through featuring their tweets, by taking their quotes and putting them up on Instagram. We’re doing a combination of curation and creation to really deliver value to our target audience. And ultimately that’s driving traffic back to our site, which is leading to a sale.

robert
[01:18:23]
Okay. Ross, I really appreciate you coming on the show and just sharing some of those top strategies you’ve shared with about Instagram marketing. I actually like the ones Nicky commenting hack for Instagram. I think that’s, that’s pretty neat. Do you have any final thoughts about Instagram marketing or just eCommerce marketing in general?

Ross
[01:18:46]
The only thing that I would recommend Robert is for people to definitely understand the psychology around why people share content, why they engage with content and why they, what makes them love content. I would strongly recommend that people spend some time understanding their audience and then understanding what motivates them, what drives them to share what motivates them to engage with your posts, spend time doing that. I think that at the end of the day, listening to a podcast like eCommerce ING podcast, they will gain insights like this. So I’m gonna leave it in your hands to ensure that receiving that message. And I, my hat’s off to you guys for delivering such a great show, keep doing what you’re doing. We need to elevate the eCommerce ING space. And I think you guys are doing a great job in helping do that. So hat’s off to you guys.

robert
[01:19:24]
Thank you for saying that. And how can people reach you if they want to just get at you?

Ross
[01:19:30]
So if you wanna find me, you can find me on Twitter. That’s probably the easiest way at the coolest cool on Twitter. Or of course you can find me on my website, Ross simmons.com, always happy to chat with marketers from all over the world. And I, again, I appreciate the opportunity to come on here and share my insights.

robert
[01:19:47]
Okay. Last question. What is the one thing an eCommerce business can do right now to help the business grow and just get traffic or sales? The

Ross
[01:19:55]
One thing they could do right now, immediately, I would say, is talk to people who have bought your product. A lot of people come up with assumptions around this is who we’re targeting. This is what they want. Talk to the people who you buy your product, talk to your customers and understand what it is that they want from you. And then deliver based off of that. It’s easy to get caught up in your own world of thinking overthinking it. But I think the number one thing you can do today to start figuring out how you can drive sales is to actually talk to your customers.

robert
[02:20:22]
Okay. Ross, thanks for being on the show.

Ross
[02:20:25]
Thanks for having me, Robert. I appreciate it.

robert
[02:20:27]
Thank you for listening to the eCommerce marketing podcast. Join the eCommerce marketing podcast, Facebook group to learn, connect, collaborate, and grow with other eCommerce marketers@ecommercemarketingpodcastdotcomslashfbwww.ecommercemarketingpodcast.com slash FB. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for eCommerce marketing podcast, and please leave a rating and the review. Thank you for listening to you next time.