Get ready to take your Instagram game to the next level! Part 2 of the instasuccess series is here and these episodes are blowing up! – if you are like me, then you will know there is a huge amount to learn about Instagram!
In this episode, we’re spilling all the tea on how to drive bookings and boost discoverability on the platform and explore ways for businesses to turn their followers into guests.
Converting lookers to bookers is the holy grail of The Accommodation Industry and the ultimate call to action. It’s not enough to simply showcase your products or services on Instagram; you need to actively drive bookings. 📢. In this episode, we cover a variety of strategies to help you stand out and make an impact on your followers.
To take us through the elements that will make a scroll-happy Instagram user pause and look again, we welcome once again Paul Anderson to Show. Paul understands the science and psychology of consumers and has mastered the art of turning lookers into bookers. He and I discuss the importance of reinforcing brand awareness, working with other businesses, and avoiding spammy tactics that could turn off potential customers. Plus, we provide examples of Instagram posts that offer value to consumers without feeling salesy or overbearing. And, if you’re wondering about the best color choices for your profile or how to maintain consistency in your branding across all elements, we’ve got you covered.
Topics we cover in this episode:
How can businesses actively drive bookings on Instagram?📈
What are the fundamentals of a well-rounded Instagram marketing strategy🌟
How to optimize Instagram content for SEO and discoverability?🚀
Why is a clear call to action important in Instagram posts?📣
How to simplify the decision-making process for potential guests, so they chose you🤔
What are effective strategies to reinforce brand awareness on Instagram🤝
What are some examples of promotional posts that provide value on Instagram🎁
What are the most effective color choices for Instagram profiles and posts🎨
How to create a killer profile on Instagram 👀
How to speak directly to potential customers in your call to action?👥
How can you create a sense of FOMO or urgency on Instagram in promotional posts?⏰
How to maintain consistency in branding across all elements on Instagram 😱
Paul Anderson is a bestselling author and owner of a successful guest house in the UK, Sandfield Guesthouse. With his extensive background in Consumer Psychology and Content Marketing, Paul is the go-to source for valuable insights into the Accommodation Industry about all things social media. Unlike generic marketing advice, Paul’s practical strategies for boosting bookings and revenue through Instagram cut through the noise and deliver real results. He’s a gifted communicator with a knack for breaking down complex concepts into easy-to-understand tips. Paul’s teachings cover everything from technical aspects of content design, creation & publishing to customer preferences, market segmentation, data-driven marketing, and competitive advantage, all leading to fully booked rentals. His expertise is in high demand and he loves sharing his experience with others.
Take advantage of the wealth of free resources he offers on his Instagram page to take your marketing game to the next level!
As Instagram continues to grow and evolve as a marketing platform, it’s more important than ever for businesses to build effective Instagram marketing strategies. And that means having a thorough understanding of the Instagram marketing landscape and measurable insights into what works and what doesn’t.
At the end of the day, businesses of all types have so much to gain from building a presence on Instagram, whether it’s growing an engaged community, reaching new guests, or even e-commerce selling. It just takes a little effort!
📽 Watch the episode here
🎙 Listen to the episode here
Transcription:
Hello and welcome back to The Accommodation Show. We help accommodation owners like you to get the knowledge and skills that you need to grow your business, improve your guest’s experience and increase your profitability.
Okay everybody welcome back to another episode of The Accommodation Show. This week is the second week of our three-part series with the lovely Paul Anderson. Welcome back.
Paul: It’s very good to see you again Bart. I’m excited to see where this journey takes us is going to be I think this is where the rubber is really gonna hit the road.
Bart: Yeah, I love it and I really enjoyed doing our previous episode about why people should be on Instagram and today folks, we’re gonna be covering off on turning lookers into bookers. Or to put it more simply how do we get people to convert during their journey from looking at a post on Instagram to actually making a booking so that you can make money from all this content that you’ve been making in the past? Is that about right?
Paul: Absolutely. Right. Let’s do it.
Bart: Yeah, fantastic. So look, let’s get straight into it today. Rather than chatting about everything that you do, we did have a previous episode. So make sure that if you are interested in that you can go back and folks if you’re watching this, what we’d like you to do now is just click below and subscribe to the channel. It really helps us with the content that we make. It helps us keep doing what we’re doing and delivering value to you. So when we’re talking about his into pockets, and quite often when we think about Instagram or those platforms, it’s quite a passive platform. We don’t think that people are actively going to go and think oh, I need to book a holiday and then go onto Instagram. Try to find a post to follow and then make a booking. How do we get people to actually change or how do we get to capture those people from them kind of smiling to then going through that funnel to making that booking?
Paul: But I think I think I kind of have to disagree with you here. So yes, people will trip over you as they’re scrolling through content and these things. However, Instagram is increasingly searchable and people do actively search for vacation rentals in Philadelphia or Bed and Breakfasts in Oxford. I know because I live it and I channel all of my energies into trying to attract both those who are passively scrolling as well as those who are actively searching. And so I think when we when we consider how we’re going to essentially convert people who see our content on Instagram and get them onto our website.
I think it’s very important to realize that there are two different streams of people as you rightly said, people who trip over our content, find it engaging, and they like what they see. And then they go looking for more, but also people who are actively looking for accommodation in a particular place and it’s those two things that are particularly key. So as technology is evolving, increasing numbers of people are going to Instagram than they are going to the likes of Google. other search engines are available. However, people are using Instagram and I know this for a fact I’ve researched it so I’m in the Royal Air Force Reserves. I often go training with people who are much younger than me and I say to them when you’re on a detachment somewhere and you want to go and find somebody to eat or somebody to drink or you’ve not been provided with board and lodgings. How do you find it? They say oh well we go to Instagram. And we look for a border accommodation in a certain location. And if we like what we see we’ll then pursue it further.
Or if they’re looking for a part and they like, disclose whatever it is because they’re much younger than me. I don’t do disclose it, but people are actively searching and so what overarching principle is that both groups of people whether people are passively going through Instagram or actively looking for something on Instagram, the only way to get into your website is through your profile. So Instagram only affords us one place for a permanently clickable link. And that is on our profile. So it’s important that we approach our profiles as the portals and I describe it but I’m when I’m coaching is the portal through which we have to get lookers onto our website and then we can then put a book now button in front of them once we have their undivided attention.
So it doesn’t really it is important that we craft our posts in order to draw people to a call to actually drive them onto our profiles. Yes, but if they get there, and it’s underwhelming or it’s disappointing, or it’s not aligned with the content, we spoke about pillars last time if if people are looking for a dog friendly place and then they go on to a profile, it doesn’t say anything about being dog friendly. They’re not going to go rooting around to confirm what they’ve previously thought they’re gonna move on and gonna get on with the rest of their lives. And you’ve lost that individual at that point. So the profile is absolutely critical and fundamental to everything else that then happens around us.
Bart: Let’s have this very interesting in the way that people are consuming content and the way that people find answers to information is changing. And it’s evolving rapidly. So much so that right now there’s a huge war between being there for Microsoft and Google as to how they’re going to deliver search. And deliver answers to people’s questions. And I guess that’s the Holy Grail is we’re trying to give people information that is relevant to them.
And from what you’re saying is you’re saying, hey, people want they understand that Instagram is a useful tool to find the information they’re looking for. So where is a great place to stay and Instagram can deliver that? And I think you’re right. I think that the act of looking for bars and restaurants has always been a thing for a long time and you’ve got huge influences that do drive traffic into a restaurant or into a bar or a club where it’s trendy to go where’s the best place to eat? Where’s the best new ice cream shop, all that kind of stuff, but for accommodation is probably not as well developed or developing. So if you’re going travelling to a particular location, where should I go to Thailand, I’ll go to Bali. I’ll go to Hong Kong or wherever it wherever but for a specific accommodation, I can see that developing more and more as people actually almost like Google, or instead of going alright, so I’m going to this particular location, where are the best accommodations to stay?
Paul: Absolutely right. I mean, even if you want to look at two fairly straightforward things, so underneath ones out handle and username, there is a category is entrepreneur creator and marketer, whatever it is, but there’s hotels, and there’s vacation rentals, and specifically, so if you use those types of tags, then when someone is using those types of search terms, Instagram is instantly going to float you certainly to the top group within that region. Stretch that even further when you do a search on the right-hand side. There’s a little teardrop icon or it’ll say location, and you can go to that location and it brings up a map. Now just beneath the map is a list of all the accounts that are posted in that small region. But between the two, there are various buttons. There’s bars and clubs. There are restaurants and cafes and the next one is hotels and accommodation.
So they’re actively looking to categorise what Instagram knows people are already looking for on Instagram. They wouldn’t be they wouldn’t give you an opportunity to filter everything into accommodation in that region, If they didn’t know people were actively looking for it and they have the wealth of data that may be absolutely pointless for them to do it on a whim. And so we can discern that people are actively looking for accommodation in a particular basis using Instagram. Now, because not many hosts are aware of this and I keep banging on preaching about it but it means that if you’re the first person to start putting your location on to your post making sure that you have a business profile with your address and a contact button, all that good stuff that gets fed into that map. So if you’re doing it and no one else does it and someone is using Instagram, they’re not going to see your competition because pain that will pop up. They tap that little nodule that comes up and they stretch your profile they can see all of your content. They can see that Lincoln bio and everything is there for them. Why would they go anywhere else at that point?
And so utilising that by putting keywords into a bio not repeating your handle with your username so it could be another monkey Palace Hotel and then it says monkey Palace Hotel, the only keyword in there as hotel. But Mighty Mouse could be family-friendly. It could have monkeys, it could you know, and that’s where the keywords go in and then when you move into the bio again, stuff it full of keywords. It’s not quite as important as the username. But people often miss that trick on the username. They just don’t put keywords in it at all. And so by recognising that people will discover you by accident, will because the algorithm thinks or knows that they’re going to be interested in it passively, as well as actively all in forms, how to structure and bio and a profile that will convert and will push people actively push people onto your website because once you’ve got them on your website, you have their undivided attention and that’s where the likes of you come in but aren’t where you hold that tension and you shape it and you constantly pushing them to the top right for that book now, which is why we do what we did.
Bart: That’s fascinating and I couldn’t agree more. I think that once people are on your Instagram profile, you start to push him through. You’ve got to make sure people your brand consistency happening and all of that and I’ll come back to the websites in a second because of course it’s something that I know an awful lot about and we can have a discussion about that because it’s not hey, just someone’s going to become a book or an Instagram.
They’re going to become a booker through that entire journey until we get to the end, but want to do a little bit more about that sort of the passive and the active sort of look at because you’re gonna have to have those categories of people looking at your Instagram profile and getting engaged with what you’re doing. And we’ve talked about the active pop and let’s kind of close that one off. So if someone’s actively looking, we can do things to try to get them in so we can do a better sort of SEO so to speak. So optimization of the profit profile through keywords through the location as well. I’m taking you through tags as well we can we can do some optimization on our posts so that when people are looking for certain keywords they’re getting drawn to our profile, is there anything else that we can do to make sure if someone is actively looking for accommodation that they’re going to find us and then maybe we can also then once we talk about anything else we need to find us then to make sure that that person actually does do the clicking that they need to do
Paul: The key to being discoverable for someone who’s actively searching for a combination type in a particular region or a particular place is just exactly that. And there is now a phrase being bandied around which is Instagram SEO, because Instagram has its own search engine. And so putting keywords in captions, which sit beneath images, even having tag lines or sound bites that have keywords overlaid on top of images so frequently I coach clients on putting your logo but also putting snippets or reviews on top. If that contains keywords the AI will pick up on that all of these things will trigger the discoverability but it all does come back to your profile. Your profile is your hub is your is your core, it’s your centre of information. So the words that you use in describing your username should be describing your business. In the bio.
I highly recommend breaking your bio into three sections, who you host family-friendly couples only whatever that that is because people will use them as search terms. So who you host, how you host them. I things that make you unique from your competition. And then a call to action. Something like get in touch and start planning your stay or special discounts with little fingers that point down to the length that you have there. And so in so when someone arrives, having seen a post that sits in one of the topics that we spoke about last time, and then they go to your profile and lo and behold they just see exactly the same result that they’re looking for and you’re speaking to the individual that is your avatar. They will you’re hoping do one or two positive things either follow the account and come back to it later or they’ll click through that link in bio. Now the the only way you can encourage people to click a link in a bio is to go in tell them to click the link in the bio. I think any marketing post that doesn’t have a call to action to it deserves crickets it deserves time. Because if you don’t ask your viewer to do something the most you’re gonna get as maybe oh I like that picture. And so calls to action at the end of every caption with keywords not crammed in with keywords it needs to flow in the caption, exactly the same repeated throughout your profile will ultimately mean that Instagram knows exactly who you are, what you’re about and therefore someone is searching for something that you fit that bill for. You’re going to pop up
Bart: And on that note, if you are not subscribed for your combination show, make sure you subscribe right now below and give us a thumbs up for that top tip for Mr. Paul. You’re absolutely right. So you need to make sure that you do have a call to action. Otherwise, the posts don’t actually achieve anything. When I see teach people about websites and I do coaching with that the structure that you actually explained through what your buyers look like is exactly the same thing on a website. Your call to action is book now. You need to avoid distracting people with all the other garbage and nonsense on your website that a lot of experts will tell you to put on there. So you’ve got to have this you’ve got to have that it gets overwhelming. The only thing you want them to do is to book but the key to all of this is making sure that you identify the person beforehand. You say hey, I’m talking to you. I want you to book and you do that by saying family friendly, pet friendly. Perfect for hen’s party, bucks party, and all those sorts of things. It’s important that you talk to your avatar that your ideal guest and you say hey, I’m talking to you, I want you to do this. So that’s how you’re thinking about the buyer, right?
Paul: And in so doing, you’re also telling the algorithms I serve these people in this way. And if people are fit these criteria, and they liked these things, and put my content in front of them and if you’re consistent with it, then the algorithm will learn that it doesn’t take much to confuse the algorithm because if you’re consistently posting about topics that you know your avatar is interested in, and then suddenly you go left feeling like it’s my grandson’s birthday and back again, the algorithm won’t know where that fits or it will just die on his heart. It will have been a complete waste of time, not only because the algorithms will understand it, but neither will your ideal guest. They’ll be like what is this this is not what I expect. It’s not what I signed up for. It’s not what I follow for and they’ll either unfollow you or they just won’t pay any attention to you in the near future, let alone the long term which is what you ultimately want because identifying your ideal guests and serving them turns them into repeat business that turns them into your Salesforce. It turns them into the people that write reviews, and it just spreads itself.
So singularity both in terms of what you’re posting, but also a call to action is absolutely crucial. And there’s a very good analogy for it. So I know that if I put Netflix or something like that in front of my son and say you’ve got 20 minutes of TV, he’ll spend about 18 of them just freaking out because he can’t choose. Then he’ll have a meltdown and his time’s up. If I give him three DVDs and say you can watch him for 20 minutes. He just picks it done and then he’s got was fun. If I say do you wanna watch this DVD or not? He would just say yes, and sit down. And it’s that singularity that translates because people don’t have an attention span. They have the attention span of my six year old it’s very similar when people are on social media. So in order to grab that you have to be very decisive. Not Oh, if you wouldn’t mind awfully there’s not too much trouble if you can comment. No, comment with your opinion. Don’t think you’re done. Just punch it out there because people won’t get upset if you’re not British and overly polite about it.
Bart: And once again, comments and bios below folks and we want your comments. We want to get your feedback we want to see if this is working. Is us telling you to post and to comment below working and if it is and if it’s compelling you to do it, the you know that we’re onto something? Okay, so, so amazing. So I couldn’t agree more with this and I’m so excited right now because there are just so many things that you know, that we will know as marketers, but also just kind of putting it into action. And doing what will you actually say? It’s, it’s actually quite difficult to get it right and to get the posts on topic and that sort of thing. And that’s something we’ve kind of started to cover on the last episode, which is about the content pillars to make sure that we’re talking to our audience in the right way. And we’ve talked about having these kinds of active people that are looking for they’re looking for somewhere to stay they click on the ad they click on they find you they have a look through your profile they uh yep, I love it. It speaks to me and they click on the link and then hopefully we take them off and they’ve got an amazing Ibookedonline website and they buy on the flip side of that so if you’ve got someone that’s passive Okay, so this is your core audience, probably 90% of people that you’re talking to on a regular basis that are engaging with your content that love what you do. You’ve got your followers, you’ve got your network. Are we able to convert them into its direct booking?
Paul: Absolutely, absolutely. Although it’s worth remembering that because you can’t yet book a room or rent a space directly on Instagram you can buy a belt or a candle or dog coach you can’t rent space, directly on Instagram then when it comes to passive consumers of Instagram. It becomes a brand awareness tool. And what that will do is it will put you top of your mind now it could be that you do something particularly exciting particularly interesting for your ideal guest and your ideal guest doesn’t know that they want to go and stay with you. They don’t know that you’re half an hour away. Well, they don’t know that you’re in the same neighbourhood as them and it would be an ideal place not necessarily for them. But for their mother or for their cousin or for their pal for their business phone call because they’re having a conference. They don’t know that you’re there, then they’re never going to consider and in this perspective comes more of a long game. Whereas if you if you’re repeatedly posting the same content or similar pillars, and you’re doing it very regularly, then you take it to the next level and this will kind of proper ninja skills. If you can find local businesses whose ideal client is exactly the same as your ideal guest.
For example, I engage a lot with local bakeries and we have a couple of Coffee Roasters. I know that my ideal guests love those. Although the people who frequent those establishments don’t need somewhere to stay, they will inevitably have people that come and visit them or people who will ask them, do you know anywhere to stay and they will then become the referral network. So what I do is I have little notifications that ping up whenever a post comes out from about 15 of these businesses that are local, and they share an ideal client with me. I will try and find something meaningful if I can’t think of anything meaningful, I won’t do anything. But if they post I try and be the first one and that means all the other 10 Dammit this coffee roastery has got 18,000 people following them.
So if I’m constantly and repeatedly popping up at the top of their feed with meaningful comments about how lovely those spaces are a coffee has all of those people following them or people who drink coffee there. When they have people come and visit they go ah there’s that place. Samuel guesthouse he knows about coffee, and they’ve already identified with me and then they’ll go looking for me. So there are a variety of ways that you can. You can reinforce brand awareness. But it basically just boils down to that by getting yourself top of mind either as a local expert or as an expert in a particular thing. You might be a farm stay for example and you have beautiful cows and you cook amazing beef or whatever that is. If you are constantly refreshing and becoming top of mind then what will happen is that the people who do follow you when they engage with your content, the algorithms will see that as valuable and push it to similar people. And if we’re always talking about an ideal gastrin ideal avatar, we want people who are similar to them as possible and the algorithm will do that for us. And as a direct result. What that means is that follower counts in my mind is massively a vanity metric. Because it’s people who don’t follow us that we want to be getting in front of people who follow us to know who we are. They’re following us because they liked what we do in their engagement in previous guests or they want to come and stay with us in the future. It’s the non followers that we need to be taught.
Bart: Okay, so look, I love, I love some of those ninja tips, by the way, work with local businesses to try to kind of work as a community towards building following brand awareness. And I really liked the idea that you just said of actually finding businesses that share a similar demographic or avatar, that that you have, and the audience that you’re trying to get to engage with your content in a way that makes complete sense. And that would also make sense that when someone’s visiting that particular establishment cafe restaurant, bar, club, zoo, or whatever it is, they go, Oh, where should I stay? Oh, it’s that one that they’ll see that there’s that network and that link?
I’m wondering what are your thoughts on in terms of passing that back to the passive kind of audience just to kind of round out this topic as well. Creating promos trading deals, doing something to engage them and say “hey, you need to book it ahead of time because Valentine’s Day is coming up or because you need to book now because if you don’t book now you won’t get a place for Easter or for Christmas. Or for special events or did you know that in our area there’s this festival happening these particular data that you have to book now” or trying to incentivize them through price to go hey, you need to book now or is that also just a recipe to get people to unfollow you and get too tired? Of what you’re doing?
Paul: I think increasingly the latter. I think it’s very, very difficult to direct sell on a social media platform because people will very, very quickly identify it. It can become quite spammy and kind of feel a bit cringy really. And I think it’s also when it comes to content marketing and outbound marketing and brand awareness, I think as well as knowing exactly to whom you’re marketing and I think it’s very, very important to be authentic, authentic to your personality or they need to what you’re comfortable with authentic to what your business ethos is, what you stand for. And, so I think it’s very, very easy to say, Oh, I’m doing 20% off at the weekend in number one cheeping yourself. People who are following you going well as visual notice.
But at the same time, I think it is it is still perfectly reasonable to create us some sense of FOMO or fear of missing out so I’ve I don’t do it, but I’ve seen it done very effectively where people will say last room last month for Wellington. But then just leave that there and say well if you’re interested then this is how you can find out how to book with us. As opposed to saying we’re doing Valentine’s promo you’re gonna have a bottle of champagne but rose petals in your toilet so there’s, there’s a blend between the two. And I think it’s very easy to put a post together and create something and just whack it out there and hopeless I was gonna go oh, that’s the deal. I suddenly want magically and the bucket thing was more likely to happen as you suggested that people will submit salesy. You’re not done.
That for a while. That’s not why I’m here. blends in, somewhat in the sense that your account and your people who follow you are a community. So Facebook has Facebook groups. Instagram doesn’t have Instagram groups that there’s talk of it but they don’t have groups per se where everyone knows exactly what it’s about and so nurturing those followers and the people who are already there, and creating a sense of connection between you and them as well as amongst themselves. Just firms all of that up and I think it’s always worth spending time with Instagram stories to connect with them, asking for what they think on particular things and engaging with them because it will unify that and I think it’s very, very easy, then just pop that bubble with a spammy salesy. Come stay with me and Valentine’s for 50 bucks and
Bart: I couldn’t agree more with what you’re saying. We don’t want to put up posts for people to actually try to sell them on those platforms. I’ve seen it done many times with different messaging, which doesn’t really fit the brand. And it’s a little bit too pushy. I mean like even from a book direct perspective, I’m a massive advocate for direct bookings in sending out the message, but don’t overwhelm your audience by a book direct book, direct book direct. It’s okay. But people get it. They’re not silly. They get it they’ve seen the message the first time. It’s something to communicate that there’s value in booking direct, but just sending that message alone. It’s all about you and it’s not really about them.
Now, when you do these posts, and when you’re talking about this passive audience, you want to engage and you want to do something that’s a little bit more salesy. Don’t forget that you’re always trying to provide value and that’s what keeps people coming back and engaging with your posts because, oh, that was really valuable. So you can still do a deal. We still do an offer. There are kind of reminders about saying, Hey, if you don’t book now it’s going to fill up. That’s a great reminder and a great piece of value. Another thing that you could do for example, if you’re looking to get those midweek states build up to say, hey, here are all the wonderful things that you can do in a midweek state in my midweek stay in my particular area, and you’ll find wow, I never knew the opportunities that I have to go during the week because one is less busy too. I can get in and do all the activities that I would normally not be able to do and all the things in your particular area that will give value once again to your audience. And I think if you’re constantly trying to strive for value, then you won’t be great against your audience you’ll resonate really well. And that and then having a call to action at the end is appropriate as well.
Paul: Yeah, so I think giving value is absolutely key to maximizing and leveraging any potential Instagram has. If you’re not giving people value, why would they? bother wasting their time looking at what you’re doing? You have to give something even if it’s something small. Someone once said to me that they use their Instagram to tell people what they ought to be doing with their business but not necessarily how they should be doing it. And if you translate that to hosting, if you come and stay here during this period, then you can have X Y, X, Y, and Z powers.
Go to my website and hit book now. So you tell them what they could be missing out on and what they can aspire to, or local tips and tricks that people are generally unaware of, or local hidden gems, or things they didn’t know about you. And then you drive them through the profile and that’s where the sale happens. I think the only place really where you can direct sell would be number one on your website. And secondly in an email marketing list because people are expecting that and that’s very, very targeted.
Bart: Beautiful. Okay, so we’ve covered off on the active lookers and how to kind of get them engaged and get them going through to the booking page. We’ve talked about the passive people, your audience that’s kind of constantly following your content. And now if we round it up, so we’ve kind of got them now they’ve clicked on the link which is fantastic. Are there any like it’s a bit of a loaded question but from your kind of Instagram brain to the book to direct website, brain. Is there anything that you recommend or things that you should that you tell people to think about in that transition from Instagram through to the book Direct website?
Paul: I think I have two things to say about this. I think if you’re just starting out, you’re thinking about I want a social media presence on things you need x, y, or z then thinking of it holistically I think is very, very important because there are brand colours that might look very, very good on a website. So I have a client and a lot of her website is black with a kind of golden color to black, white and Goldie comes when you translate that over into Instagram into a very small image or a small pocket of graphics. It just comes across as a bit like a strip joint. It just comes across as a bit cheesy and a bit glitzy and that’s not what this client does. When you go to the website. It does actually look really really classy. So thinking about that holistically is very, very important.
And I would I’m known for flipping processes on their heads. So what I would suggest is it once you’ve come up with your brand colour schemes and these things where if you have that well established, and translating that into your content into your profile, and then again, translating it into your content is absolutely key such that granted, people are coming from a post to the profile and onto the website but if you design it, website branding, profile content, they when they come down that slide, it doesn’t feel like they’ve ever gone anywhere.
You remove any resistance to them coming down that funnel or coming down and sliding and getting onto your website. And so in many respects certainly when I designed my colour schemes and my highlight covers for some of your guesthouses and looked at logos and variations and colours within the same logo. I started with my website so there’s a brown or white and an orangey colour as I write how can I translate that into my content? So it doesn’t really matter what the image is, but I have Southfield. guesthouse in an orange, brown, and orange-brown and white Brown and brown white depending on what the background is and I swapped them out so it’s the same logo, but the colours are in there. And then the same colours are repeated in my highlights and then the same colours are repeated in a website. So considering them holistically Is there a good idea, but if you’re already well established and starting with your website, go right. That’s the font I’m always going to use when I put text in front of an image because it’s the same font that I use in my headline banners. On my website, for example, just people often think oh, it’s not really gonna make a massive difference but if you go down a slide and you get over a small bump, you’re going to notice it, and it’s ironing out all of those little bumps on is absolutely key to getting someone from a POST call to action profile website.
Bart: I love it. So effectively it’s brand consistency. So that when someone sees one brand, that when it gets through to or that they’re moving through that journey that it all kind of matches. And like you said sometimes you’re not gonna get 100% there but at least as long as you’re conscious of conscientious of what you want to achieve so colours are very important. Font funds can be incredibly powerful as well. Yeah, language if you think about also the pictures that you use the colours the tones as well they can they all need to kind of match the when people get to where they’re going that journey in that story. It’s congruent and all makes sense. And so therefore they have little resistance when they actually get to the website. When we think about the website and we think about someone landing there. The good thing is if they’ve come up with Instagram, there’s a very good chance that the trust element is already there in terms of trusting you and your brand. It’s not like just a bare search on Google and then you go in and you have to figure out who is this person and that sort of thing. So we don’t have to go and reinforce that particular step as much on the website.
But the one thing we do want to do on the website is to show people that it’s going to be simple to get through to the checkout or do what it is that they’re looking to do. So that’s one of those kinds of key pillars that are teaching our coaches like once they’re there, they don’t know whether it’s going to be easy or difficult. To get to the checkout. They don’t know whether it’s actually secure. They don’t know how long it’s going to take them to fill out all the details on the 20 different forms that you’ve put together. And we’ve all been there where we get to the shopping cart, and it’s seven steps and you’re like oh my god to get out of this. It’s gonna take me forever.
I’m going to abandon this and go and shop it on Amazon or go back to Airbnb, that sort of thing. So you actually it’s a shame but right now if it isn’t broke, don’t say you have to spell it out but it is going to be easy, relatively quickly, at the top of the website, or something to recommend there. I want to start to kind of move us toward wrapping up because I like to keep these episodes within that kind of half an hour range. Is there anything else that we’re missing, Mr. Paul?
Paul: No, I genuinely don’t think there is I think the key to converting active or passive people on Instagram, all live in the profile. The profile is a hub of everything that you do on Instagram. And as it sits in the middle between content and between the website then that very much is important. I always have pins at the top of my feed and the social media Hotelli how to create a killer profile. And it’s all laid out there plain as you like in simple English simple language. And if you work through it step by step. I’ve seen clients do it demonstrably and measurably seeing more people coming from Instagram onto their website, seeing more people becoming followers having visited the profile rather than scrolling on. That’s where the ROI kicks in.
Bart: Oh, you are amazing your wealth and fountain of knowledge. I do enjoy talking to you because I swear to god I’ve missed so many things and I’ve gotta go do this. I’ve got to do that. Because we all think that we know everything about our businesses. We know how to do all this stuff. But sometimes just the reminder, hey, you got to go and focus on these different points and make a huge difference. So I appreciate talking to you so much, folks. Your job right now is to leave us a comment below. And let us know if you found this episode useful and why?
And make sure that you give us a like and a follow subscribe. Next week in our next episode, we’re going to be talking about how to put the content together so whether we’re going to use any particular tools to create a reel or a story, how to create stories and reels and all that kind of basic stuff that for a lot of people they’ll find it quite overwhelming because there are so many different ways to do it. So many different tools, and so many platforms. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to ask Paul how he does all of his stuff to create the content. So creating content next week is what we will be talking about. But once you have that you so much appreciate you give us a quick shout-out to your Instagram profile and all your links.
Paul: So that’s at @thesocialmediahotelli eight on Instagram that’s always going to be the best starting place. I can’t be talking about Instagram and not being massively prominent, I guess there is anyway. I’m so excited about next week in the stripping right back is not as complicated as people think. Do step-by-step, how to do it.
Bart: Good work I appreciate you so much. Take care, and have a fantastic rest of the day can save us
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