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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 4,400+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:
1234 Exit. Exit, exit. All right, Jenn, good to have you on the Exit Five podcast for people who haven't met you before or haven't hung out with you to talk about Instagram. Who are you and what do you do?
Jenn Herman [00:00:26]:
So I am Jenn Herman. It's Jenn with two n's. And I've been doing this talking, Instagram, social media for over a decade now. I started a little hobby blog back in 2013, and it was Jenn's trends in social media. And so it was writing about what was going on in social media, all platforms and that sort of thing. And in the process, there was this little app called Instagram that all my friends were on. And I was like, oh, another platform. But I was like, if I'm going to write about trends in social media, I kind of have to embrace this thing called Instagram.
Jenn Herman [00:01:00]:
So I started playing with it and I fell in love with it. As a user. I loved the photography and the filters and the interaction. The community was such a fun platform, but there was nobody talking about how to use it for business. Everything was, you know, at the time, use filters and use hashtags, but there was no strategy. I took this little blog that I had, and I started blogging every week about Instagram tactics. I would try things, I would be very scientific, and I would do case studies, and I would see what worked. And the more I did it, the more I blogged about it.
Jenn Herman [00:01:35]:
I started getting picked up to speak on podcasts, and over the years became now the forefront expert on Instagram marketing. If you ask Chat GPT, they will tell you I am the best. It's one of these things that I built into a business, it's built into a brand, it's built into a career that I love, and I wouldn't change it for anything, but it was very much a circumstance of life. It was not something I planned to do, for sure.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:57]:
What year did you start that blogging, by the way?
Jenn Herman [00:01:59]:
2013.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:01]:
And it's crazy to think about how much Instagram as a platform has evolved, right? Like, when you started writing about Instagram, it was very much photos.
Jenn Herman [00:02:09]:
There was only photos. There weren't even videos.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:13]:
And now, is that the primary, is video the primary thing that you talk about? Obviously, we'll get into, into that. But, like, when you think of Instagram in your head now, do you think video is the leading piece of that?
Jenn Herman [00:02:23]:
I don't. I mean, reels really are like such a big component of what we do on Instagram. Obviously, it's, it's moved to that environment. But most Instagram diehards still think of a photo. We still think of it as a photo based platform. People still look at it from going to the feed and seeing photos and those sorts of things. And then now we've got reels and stories, and it's definitely evolved, but it is still photo based.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:50]:
All right, chat GPT four came with the receipts. Jenn Herman, she's a social media consultant and focuses specifically on Instagram. She's known for her deep dives into Instagram's functionalities and her ability to tailor strategies to different business sizes. Awesome.
Jenn Herman [00:03:05]:
I love the proof source in life.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:07]:
Heck, yeah. You got it. We got. We got to do that.
Jenn Herman [00:03:10]:
I know I put it out there. You better bring the receipts, right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:13]:
Definitely. Yeah. There's a lot of people that don't have receipts today, so that. That's great. All right, so our audience is b, two b marketers. I want to talk about Instagram specifically in this episode. For marketers, I would say most of the audience is doing. There is some non tech, but I would say most of the people are, like, working in software companies, tech in some way.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:32]:
And then there's also b, two b, non tech. So, first of all, where would you start with Instagram? I don't know how familiar you are with this audience or if you shared any. Any ideas with this type of content before, but, like, where do I start? How do I first decide if I want to pick Instagram as the channel to go after for my business?
Jenn Herman [00:03:50]:
Yeah. Well, and to that point, I'm probably. I'm sure I'm the highest level expert that teaches Instagram for b, two b. I love going to b. Two b conferences. I love teaching b, two b for Instagram because it's one of those things people traditionally think of Instagram for b, two C, right? We think of it when you've got the widget, the project, the product, the thing that you can put in your hand, that you can sell somebody. We think of it from pretty pictures.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:13]:
Also, for context, we mentioned this before. We're not. We're talking about 100% grass fed organic. We're talking about organic Instagram. We're talking. We're not talking about. This isn't about ads. This is organic content.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:25]:
And this is right in. Right in the wheelhouse. I love. I love social media. I love content from a marketing standpoint. So this is right in our wheelhouse. Okay, so we got the best lady in the space right now. Let's go deep.
Jenn Herman [00:04:36]:
So where do we start? The first thing you need to think about is what is your goal with using Instagram, right? So like any social media, why would you be using this for your B2B? Is it brand awareness? Are you in launch phase? Are you in startup phase? Are you in regeneration phase? Are you ten years into your B2B product? What is your goal? Is it sales? Are you just trying to, you know, increase sales by 20% by using social media? Are you, like I said, looking for brand awareness? Are you looking for brand loyalists? Do you want to be working with influencers? What is the goal? And then that helps you direct where the strategy is going to go. So if you're looking for more brand awareness, it's going to be that higher level stuff, right? What does your brand do? The problems you solve, why you did it, your missions, your values, your teams, all these sorts of things that you can showcase. Whereas if you were going more after sales, you still want that component, but of course, you want to be showcasing your B2B product or service in use. You want to have case studies, you want all these additional components that obviously sell the product and have a sales component to some of your content as well. But it's never going to be 100% sales on any social media platform, and especially on Instagram, there will always be those brand awareness, the behind the scenes, all of these additional components that are what people want to connect with. And one of the hardest things for B2B brands is they go gentle. My business isn't visual. How am I supposed to create reels? How am I supposed to create photos? I don't have anything to photograph.
Jenn Herman [00:06:03]:
And I always tell my clients, I'm like, imagine you had a reality tv show that came and filmed you for a day. Where would you go? What would you do? Who would you talk to? Think of it from that perspective. And so get the videos, get the photos. Whether it's having somebody in your team take a photo of you sitting at your desk, whether it's hiring a photographer for a day, but on the phone, at the computer, in the lab, with your team, in the conference room, whatever these things are that you can start to demonstrate, even if it's you just sitting at home, at your home office, there's things that you are doing every day that you can showcase. It can be you holding your phone with something up on the screen that showcases your product or service. We want to find creative ways, as if you had a camera crew following you around, that we would be putting up on tv. What does that visual look like?
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:51]:
I love that. I think the best social media advice that I've picked up in my experience has been Gary V's like, document don't create approach. And I think that's like what you're describing there. And so I love that, like the reality show thing, like talk about what you're doing, because who is that going to attract if you talk about that particular topic? Like, if you sell to HR professionals and you're building a product for them, you talk about that. That shrinks down the audience for who's going to be interested in that, right, exactly. Do you need to have a plan? Do you need to have a strategy? Do you need just like, can we just start, like, hey, we think we want to do this. Here's why. Blah, blah, blah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:30]:
Let's just start. My platform is LinkedIn. And I tell founders, like, you honestly need to just get going, just start writing, start creating content. Do you feel the same about with Instagram?
Jenn Herman [00:07:41]:
Yeah, it's easy to say we need a strategy and you should have a goal and you should have direction. And strategy is great. And I am a queen of advocating for strategy. But often, especially in the B2B and especially in the tech space, we can get a little mired in strategy. And we're so determined to do strategy that we're not doing execution. And so it really is a matter of getting on the platform, going and seeing what your competitors are doing, going and seeing what the people you follow on Instagram are doing. Like, just go be active. Go figure out what gets you excited.
Jenn Herman [00:08:13]:
What types of videos do you like watching, what photos drag you in or what tutorials, whether they're carousels, whether they're text or videos or those sorts of things. What is making you get excited to watch and read that content? What are your competitors doing? What's driving that engagement? Get comfortable with what is working for others and then start thinking about, all right, well, how can I do that for me, if I really love dog videos and dogs doing silly things? But like you said, but I create software for HR, how do I make them the same thing? Well, you're clearly not going to always have a dog video, but if it's cute little 15 2nd entertainment videos, okay, can you have cute, fun 15 2nd videos related to your HR software? Do you have a mascot for your company? Can you borrow your kid for a day to do cute videos or put a dog sitting in front of a computer looking at the software? Like, what are things that you can do that spur some creativity, that you're using inspiration from the things that you enjoy or that others, you know, are creating that you like and get comfortable. Start creating content. What you do today will not be what you do a year from now, and it will not be what you do five years from now. So like you said, start, get out there, create the content, and then evolve as you grow.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:29]:
Let's go back to the initial strategy development for a second. What would you want to hear? What would a good goal be? Because I feel like oftentimes this is where we make a mistake in selecting a social media channel. Like, we want to sell more stuff. Like, okay, obviously. But if you measure it from that lens and then three months in, you're like, man, I listened to Jenn's advice. I started post on Instagram. We haven't made a single additional sale for our B2B product in three months. Like, I'm going to quit this channel.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:58]:
Let's talk through a scenario of, like, what would a good goal be like, and maybe reasons why to select Instagram and pick that channel to go after.
Jenn Herman [00:10:07]:
So first and foremost, it is about putting realistic goals. A lot of times you get somebody that comes to me and they go, Jenn, we want 10,000 followers. And I'm like, okay, but why? And they're like, well, because then we'll be popular. And I'm like, but what does 10,000 followers do for you? Do 10,000 followers translate into 10,000 customers? Do 10,000 followers meand I more sales, more revenue, more brand awareness. Like, what does that number do? And a lot of times you look at people or customers or clients and you're like, you can't even serve 10,000 people, so why would you want 10,000 followers? Like, if your max capacity as a business is to create for a thousand, then having 10,000 followers may be too much. So it's not so much about the number, but it's about where are you and what do you want to go towards from there? So if you currently, you know, have a platform and you're servicing 500 clients and you really want to double that over the next year, you want to get to having a thousand clients. It's not going to be Instagram and silo. You're going to have all your other social media, your business development and all these things.
Jenn Herman [00:11:10]:
So it's not going to be just Instagram pushing towards that, but that's where you start going, okay, we want to build the awareness. We want to get more followers. And maybe you set a realistic expectation of if you have 200 Instagram followers now, you want to get to a thousand, so you put like a realistic number on it and then you put related to probably more the dark social. What are you doing to build the relationships that are going to lead to, again in the B2B space, the long term loyalist clients. You're not over here putting up posts. It's like, look at these amazing handbags. And it's like a spontaneous buy and you're buying it because you're going on a trip next week and you want the handbag. These are software, right? These are programs.
Jenn Herman [00:11:49]:
These are the. Even if it's manufacturing or whatever it is you're doing, these aren't spontaneous purchases. These are things that go through massive budget constraints with your clients and all these different factors. So it's more about building the awareness. And how can you have those conversations on dark social? That's comments, direct messages, people replying to your stories where you're fostering them and getting them into your bigger lead funnels.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:15]:
Yeah. Or like if you're maybe a marketing agency and you're selling agency services package. Right. I think for any of these examples, when I think about B2B, I've always said that I think the best ingredient for B2B marketing is your expertise.
Jenn Herman [00:12:29]:
Yes.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:30]:
What do you think about that as a content strategy for Instagram? Let's use this channel to become a go to resource for our customers and let's make them smart. And so instead of this page being all about sprinkling in your elements of building in public and showing what the company is doing, but like, okay, we want to build a page on Instagram that people who work in HR love and are sending to all their friends and colleagues. And that could be like a funny. It could be funny, it could be memes and reels. Would that be a reasonable way to, like, develop a strategy instead of just saying like, yeah, we want, we want 2000 followers, it's more like, well, we think there's an opportunity here to be this fun page that people follow and we build brand affinity through that page.
Jenn Herman [00:13:13]:
Yeah. I mean, honestly, you're kind of speaking my love language right now. I'm the biggest proponent for education and it is, like you said, it's one of the best ways to build a credible resource within your Instagram profile. And that's the shareable content. Right. When you're putting up the tips, the tutorials, the tactics, the memes, the relatable type things in the industry, that's what people share. And that, again, is how you're going to build the brand awareness, grow audience, reach more people. But it builds the loyalists, right? It builds the people that say, oh, I have a question about this industry, and I know this account is going to have the answer, or if they don't have content about it, I can ask them and they're going to have the answer.
Jenn Herman [00:13:52]:
And so you start to build this trust factor that when time comes, they're coming to you to be like, hey, we heard about this news article that they're changing this regulation in the industry, or we're seeing this trending. Do you think this is the way the industry is going? They're going to come to you because you've created this wealth of expertise. And I always say people on Instagram are typically there to be entertained, but that doesn't mean that because they're there to be entertained that they don't want to be educated. And we typically think of LinkedIn and Twitter and maybe threads now and even Facebook for more of the education platforms. But educational content does incredibly well on Instagram as a platform.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:32]:
I think that's super smart to share that because I think there is some perception in b, two b circles that to build a page on Instagram as an example, it has to be silly or it has to be like memes or like, you have to play to certain content types on Instagram. I think education and expertise is always going to win. You can have a serious page and people want that information. You could sell to accountants or legal or whatever the example is. And it doesn't have to be silly or funny. That's definitely one angle. But if that's nothing natural for you as a person or as a brand, maybe that doesn't make sense. And so that's why I like to push people towards start with education.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:09]:
If you're not sure if you're going to go the funny route, lean on education.
Jenn Herman [00:15:13]:
That's like, one of my favorite accounts for a combination of education and entertainment. Well, two of them, actually. TSA, the people that make you take your shoes off at the airport have one of the best Instagram accounts in the world.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:25]:
Do they? I've never looking at it right now.
Jenn Herman [00:15:27]:
No, legit. I think I've directed, like, half of their million followers because I tell everybody about TSA and then also national park Services. I mean, they're more government than they are b. Two b, but same idea. And TSA is literally dad joke Central, but it's educational. So they're like, here, don't take guns onto airplanes. They'll show you, like, how someone hid a knife in a peanut butter container. But then they'll make a joke about nuts because it's in a peanut butter jar.
Jenn Herman [00:15:50]:
Like, it is. It is witty, it is funny, but it's educational. So there's ways to kind of blend the two. And even beyond that, to your point, I mean, you'll never find a meme on my Instagram account. I just don't do memes. It's not my world. I like them, but I just. I don't create and communicate in that fashion.
Jenn Herman [00:16:08]:
And I would say 70% of the content on my Instagram account is education. And that's why when you go to chat dvd and say, best accounts to follow for Instagram tips, it's going to say, jen strengths, because most of my content is based on education. And that's. That's what I do. I mean, I speak, I teach. This is what I do. But that's what people want. They want the tips, they want those resources, and that's the highly shared content.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:34]:
Yeah. Well, then, like. Or you mix in something, like 90% of your content is about your business, but then, like, oh, there's a picture with, like, your kid who was sick and had the flu. And, like, those are how you build trust and credibility and relatability. Relatability. We'll get to, like, types of content in a minute. But. So here's how I would think about it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:51]:
We want to create a channel. So I think you can't first pick, like, we want to go to Instagram. It needs to be, like, work your way back up. We want to build a stronger connection with our potential audience online. Okay. And so how are we going to do that? Well, we've already, most people here listening, like, probably are already doing LinkedIn. We want to add a second chat. We want to add a second channel.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:08]:
Maybe that's how we can make this really specific for somebody. All right, cool. What should that second channel be? Should it be Instagram? Well, yeah, Instagram. Okay, that could work. But what about TikTok, Jenn? And what about YouTube shorts? And what about YouTube? Like, do you have a perspective on, like, why Instagram and versus one of those other channels? And even if you can succeed on all those others, let's just play the Instagram game and tell people that, like, let's pick Instagram and make the case for that.
Jenn Herman [00:17:31]:
This is where I get to drop stats and data. So, first of all, Instagram is one of the longest standing platforms. When you look at the platforms in general today, right? You look at LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter's gone through massive shifts, and you can still claim Twitter, but everything else, I mean, Pinterest is there, but that's not usually as great for B2B tick tock is new. Clubhouse was new. Like, we have all these things that pop up. Instagram has the longevity against something like TikTok, and I have nothing against TikTok. I have nothing. I don't want to see it get banned.
Jenn Herman [00:18:05]:
I have nothing against TikTok as a platform, but I just want to say that all the TikTok experts I know have now become vertical video or short form video experts. They're no longer just TikTok experts, because Instagram has the longevity. Instagram has the robust meta platform behind it that gives you all the interactions. It gives you the ad platform, it gives you the bandwidth across every global market and everything like that. But you've got over 2 billion monthly active users on Instagram. So your audience is there. The largest demographic on Instagram is the 25 to 35 demographic, the second largest being the 35 to 45 demographic. So in most B2B industries, that's your target audience.
Jenn Herman [00:18:47]:
That 25 to 45 are the people making the business decisions. They're the ones in that, you know, mid to rising up to senior level management. They're the ones that are starting to hold the purse strings for the budgets. They're the ones that are out there looking for the solutions for their organizations. Your target demographic is the largest demographic on Instagram. So compared to TikTok, where it's typically a younger demographic, and even YouTube, I mean, YouTube is great, don't get me wrong. You can take your reels and put them up on YouTube shorts. I highly recommend it because Google's still a dominant platform, right? It's still the search engine of search engines.
Jenn Herman [00:19:23]:
And if you've got YouTube shorts, it's worth having them there. But now Instagram is actually ranking in Google search, which it never used to do until recent months, where now if you go look for something on Google, your Instagram posts, not your profile, but your Instagram posts will actually start showing up in Google search. So you have that added search advantage with your Instagram content now, too.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:45]:
Oh, interesting. Remember the good old days when they used to show tweets in Google? Or maybe they do again now, but, okay, that's interesting. And you need to make specific content for the platform, right? Like, I see companies, and I've done this myself, where if you just kind of make one generic thing and post it across all five channels or whatever, it doesn't really pop off. How important is it to really focus in and say, like, we're going to understand Instagram, we're going to understand what Instagram wants and create content specifically for Instagram versus do what a lot of companies do with YouTube, which is like, let's just take all our videos and put them up on a YouTube channel. And each YouTube video has 16 views.
Jenn Herman [00:20:23]:
Yeah, totally guilty of that, by the way. I just take all my reels and I just put them on YouTube so that they're there. But I don't make content for YouTube and the thing, and then raise it like I get no views on those, but they're on Google. But that's the thing. It really is about knowing the platform and again, recognizing that difference in the audience. Right? So if you're creating videos for three different platforms, if you're creating them for Google and YouTube shorts, you want certain search criteria, right? You want certain keywords, you want certain captions, you want the content that's going to answer the question in a certain way. If you're going for TikTok content that's targeting a younger demographic, there are people that probably aren't going to Google as much. So you want to put that in a context that's maybe a little less, well, grammar, less educated, a little more quick and punchy.
Jenn Herman [00:21:11]:
That doesn't mean that you can't have good quality, educated content on TikTok, but you're typically going to get people that want to hear in more layman's terms, Instagram is kind of in the middle of those two, right? So you're going to have that mid range audience, people who understand proper sentence structure, but yet who have a limited time span. When you're getting somebody on Instagram reels, you're getting people who are still swiping very quickly. And so you kind of want to meld the two in terms of just your general content, but then there's all the editing, right? So Instagram as well is very cognizant. They're not as bad about this, but they were very bad about this in the beginning when Reels launched three years ago, where if you took a video that had clearly been fully formatted elsewhere and you uploaded to Instagram and you said publish without make any edits to it, they would reduce the performance of that video because they knew you took that same video and put it on multiple platforms. Whereas if you put it on Instagram and you use an Instagram filter and you add Instagram music and you add Instagram text boxes, Instagram goes hey, we know this content is unique to our platform. We know that this exact same piece of content isn't available anywhere else. We're going to reward you with more reach and distribution. So there's advantages to taking even just the route.
Jenn Herman [00:22:25]:
Like I will film a video on my camera, on my phone, save to my camera roll, and then I edit individually to the individual platforms ideally, right? So put different cover photo on TikTok, then I put a cover photo on Instagram. And you tailor them. Even though you're starting with the same root content, that will always give you better performance. But yes, it means more time and commitment to each platform.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:49]:
As you mentioned, TSA. And what was the other example you mentioned?
Jenn Herman [00:22:53]:
National park service.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:54]:
Let's talk about content types. Like what types of content have you found to be most effective for B2B brands? If we can give some specific examples of types of content. So go document your stuff. But what types of creative is going to work? Or would you want to go see people do?
Jenn Herman [00:23:11]:
We'll talk about four key things. So there's Instagram photos, just a single post. There's Instagram carousels, Instagram stories and Instagram reels. So when we talk photos, things to think about with your photos is, again, people don't want stock photos, they don't want meme. Well, that's not true. They don't want. You can do memes, but you want them in a way that is relatable to your industry. Graphics like infographics and a lot of text on an image not going to do well on Instagram.
Jenn Herman [00:23:39]:
So instead we want photos taken on your smartphone. They don't have to be DSLR, heavily edited, professional photos, real photos, ideally photos with people in them. People connect with people. So we want photos that showcase who your business is, what you do. And when I say who your business is, the people, they want to see that component. So photos are still great, but we want to get away from text heavy. Keep all your text in the caption. Just a great photo or two or three words on the photo alone.
Jenn Herman [00:24:09]:
When we talk carousels, carousels are where you can have currently up to ten. They're testing doing 15 or 20 slides per carousel. But it's where when you go to Instagram and you can swipe horizontally left to right across, and there's a series of photos and or videos in that one single post, carousels get extra exposure. So if you go in and you look at Instagram and you see my post and it's a carousel, and you do not interact with it. The next time you come back to Instagram, you're going to see my post again with the second frame from the carousel. So it's a second chance for exposure. These are really good for again, information that you really want to get out, like launch information, new product information, because you really want to make sure people got that awareness. It's great for if you're doing events, fundraisers, things like this where you have a ton of content around a single thing and you don't want to have 14 posts and alienate and drive your audience crazy, you put them all on a carousel.
Jenn Herman [00:25:07]:
So much easier. So those are incredibly powerful. They're kind of a secret sauce to success. Don't overdo the carousels because it's content saturation, but they're very valuable. Instagram stories are where we typically lag, and yet Instagram stories in general are the highest converting content on Instagram. So your feed is great. People are there. Typically your feed is going to serve your existing audience.
Jenn Herman [00:25:31]:
Your stories are only feeding your existing audience. Stories don't show up in search. Stories don't typically show up and explore those sorts of things. So they're serving your existing audience. And this is where we tend to let our hair down figuratively, right? We don't care about the audio, we don't care about the lighting as much because they disappear in 24 hours, whatever, it's fine. But it's because you're doing the real, raw, authentic stuff in stories. And you can use link stickers so you can send people anywhere on the Internet that you want them to go. So stories have very high conversions for most brands, especially in the B2B space.
Jenn Herman [00:26:05]:
And then finally there's reels and reels. Two things to keep in mind. Super short, under 20 seconds are top of funnel. Like top, top, top, top of funnel brand awareness. Those are what go into explorer and recommended posts. Super short, no call to action, not trying to sell anything. Brand awareness type things. Longer reels, 30 to 90 seconds, are serving your existing audience.
Jenn Herman [00:26:30]:
Those typically don't show up into the recommended and explorer, but those are the ones with your tutorials, your education, your value add, those get the shares, those get the additional value distribution, but again, are serving your existing audience. Reels in general tend to be the lowest converting content. Most people, when they're watching videos and swiping, will not leave a reel to go follow your link in bio or do that sort of thing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:59]:
And when you're talking about converting, it means like, it could mean like if you're trying to promote something up, a newsletter, sign up, a webinar or this event or whatever. Whatever.
Jenn Herman [00:27:06]:
Okay, exactly. That would be save those more for stories and then your feed post with a send me a DM or go to the link in bio call to action.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:14]:
What about a lot of nice professional looking pages? Do these like manicured collections of stories? Should you do that so you can do the.
Jenn Herman [00:27:23]:
They're called highlights. Yeah. Where you have like the bubbles on.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:25]:
Your profile, people will have like a canvas, like they'll make a logo, like a canva, like hand or, I don't know, there's like a logo for that. And they have these highly manicured sections.
Jenn Herman [00:27:35]:
I like them when they're done. Well, highlights can be great for things like meet the team about us or, you know, a quick overview of your products or those sorts of things. Keep it to only three or four highlights and if you're going to use them, update them regularly. Nothing says I trust this brand more than going in and seeing that that thing is 250 weeks old. You're like, say what now? If your content and the stories highlights is more than 52 weeks old, which is a year, it's time to update the content. And we don't want a hundred stories and a highlight. A lot of times people just keep adding to those highlights, but it's chronological from the first story added. So if you had the first story four years ago and you just keep adding to that highlight, people are never going to get to the ones from today because they're tapping through 50, 60 posts and they're all from four, three, two years ago.
Jenn Herman [00:28:31]:
So you want to clean those out and keep them much more current.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:34]:
What do you say to someone that would listen and say, well, my, yes, great, Jenn. My customers aren't on Instagram, though.
Jenn Herman [00:28:40]:
So yes, they are. I can guarantee, again, with 2 billion monthly active users they're there. People are on Instagram and your customer is a human. They may not be on Instagram 4 hours a day, but they are on Instagram. And whether they're logging in twice a week or, or twice a month, they are there. And it's a matter of creating the content that connects with why they're there. Right. Are they logging in to see their friends and family, to follow their grandkids or what are they doing on the platform and why are they there? And then craft your content to meet them where they are.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:16]:
So that's crazy. That's crazy. 2 billion monthly active users. That's confirmed. That is an actual stat.
Jenn Herman [00:29:24]:
That's a fact.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:25]:
Jenn doesn't mess around. We've already fact checked. She's a real gangster. Okay? We love LinkedIn. This audience loves LinkedIn. There's 310 million monthly active users on LinkedIn.
Jenn Herman [00:29:36]:
Oh, my gosh.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:38]:
Right? So we're talking about five or six x the opportunity here. And people are there. Now, the trick is, though, you got to meet them where they're at. And so, like you said earlier, most people are not opening Instagram to think business. And so you have to really think about what is your angle going to be. But I wanted to have you on this podcast because I think you got to as a marketer today, every channel is saturated, so they say, right?
Jenn Herman [00:30:03]:
Yeah, 2 billion people, it's saturated.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:06]:
But the opportunity is to think from a company standpoint. Okay. And by the way, while you were talking just now, I was, like, trying to find good B2B Instagram profile examples. All of the examples that people write about and share are either old or humongous. Companies like Adobe, Adobe, John Deere, Mailchimp, Boeing, FedEx. To me, the reason I wanted to record this conversation is because if you're a marketer today, you're trying to do more with less, and you're trying to find these opportunities. One of the things you can do is find the gaps, find the pockets of underpriced attention, I think, is to steal another. Gary Vee ismdez.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:41]:
There's 2 billion monthly active users on Instagram. You sell HR software. None of your competitors have done anything on Instagram. Huh? Should we go play in another crowded channel? Or should we go and try to, like, build something here? That's why I wanted to do this. It's like, oh, maybe this is the push that you need to, like, let's go take a bet and let's go try to build something out on Instagram.
Jenn Herman [00:31:04]:
And that's the thing, right? Like, this is why I love teaching Instagram for B2B, because most B2B brands aren't there. Or if they're there, they're not doing it well. We're not thinking of it from that kind of smaller B2B business. We're thinking of it when you research these things. Like you said, we're looking at Boeing and Adobe and Mailchimp and these massive organizations that have teams running their social media. And, you know, you may be in your B2B space. You're like, well, I am the HR coordinator and the marketing expertise. You might be the CEO and the marketing.
Jenn Herman [00:31:40]:
So you're running all these multiple hats and to have to do another platform. Another thing, and Jenn's over here telling you to do Instagram. You're like, I can't. I can't bring myself to do it. But it is the chance to stand out against your competitors and meet your audience where they are because they're on Instagram.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:56]:
Let's talk about the personality of Instagram. I feel like if you see a lot of Instagram accounts or TikTok accounts, it is often like, Jenn becomes the face of X brand in a world where there might be lots of turnover at a company or someone doesn't want to be the face. Do you have suggestions on strategy for, like, if it should be Jenn in the content? Should Jenn be like the voice of the company? Should it be more like Jenn's behind the scenes creating and curating this content? Do you know what I'm trying to articulate?
Jenn Herman [00:32:24]:
Yeah. And that's, again, this all depends on your brand, right? At this point, you've probably done some sort of brand development. You know, your brand tone, voice, style, colors, avatar, all these sorts of things. And you know what that is, right? Like I always say, I'm like, you might be like that super chill, surfer type brand. Like you have bean bags in the lobby and you do craft beard sessions every weekend and, or you may be the super polished, pencil skirt wearing, stiletto wearing type, very polished, professional organization, whatever that is. That's what you want your brand to translate on social media and on Instagram. So if your brand, if someone was to walk into essentially your office or come into one of your Zoom calls and everyone's sitting around in board shorts and t shirts, but your Instagram channel is all corporate jargon and super stodgy professional. They don't correlate.
Jenn Herman [00:33:20]:
Right. We want that brand to match what is happening in your, your actual brand in terms of personality. Now, you can have faceless videos, you can have faceless content. You don't have to have a face of your brand. The TSA account, one man runs that entire account. We've never seen his face. You don't know who he is, but he's obviously the king of dad jokes. But this is part of their brand.
Jenn Herman [00:33:42]:
It's become how they are known on social media. But you never see his face. He's the one creating all the content and he's the one. I'm sure it's run through various authorities and various components at different levels, but they've created that brand style and you can do the same. You pick up whatever that we're going to talk and we're going to use these types of lingo and we're going to talk to this general audience and then you're going to write your captions. And if you do voiceovers on your audio, you choose who's going to do your voiceovers or you do the text to speech where you put in the caption, and then you use the automated, the AI voices that do the text to speech. And they all start to sound the same, but they're trendy. People like them.
Jenn Herman [00:34:21]:
There's a million ways that you can do this where you don't have to have a single face of the brand. If you're worried about turnover or if your CEO is not the best person to put on camera, because we've all had those, that's fine. Don't make the CEO the voice or the face of the brand. It's okay to do other things that showcase the entire team or just make it faceless.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:43]:
How would you think about measuring this as you get going? Before this, I did a podcast with somebody where we talked about LinkedIn and he's built a following there. And he basically was like, you know, I wanted to do this, but I had to basically not really not think about measuring it and just kind of commit to creating content for twelve months. And now I'm reaping the rewards of this. How should somebody think about Instagram knowing that it's very easy to, like, do it for three weeks and be like, oh, this isn't working, and quit it.
Jenn Herman [00:35:09]:
So my biggest thing I tell people when it comes to Instagram is you need six to eight weeks to test anything. And that means six to eight weeks of consistent posting. That doesn't mean you posted like twice in six weeks. And you call that a test. For record, I have two science degrees, so I'm a total data nerd. I actually love to geek out on the science, the insights that that comes behind the platform, but so you want to do like a six week test. So if you're going to post a reel every week for six weeks, now you have data, you don't get to do a reel and go, oh, well, that didn't work. Reels don't work for us.
Jenn Herman [00:35:40]:
You need to have enough of them to say, okay, our long form reels do better than short form reels or are really short. Reels are great for reach, but not so great for engagement. These sorts of things are what you need to test over time. Same thing goes for, for feed posts. And I tell people, you know, I do Instagram audits regularly. I'm actually doing one right now for a medical organization, you go through and it's trying to pick apart these things and you look at things and I'm like, okay, so random fun fact. The color green works well for you. You don't always know what translates to your audience and you don't have that information until you do the actual data set and look at how your content is doing.
Jenn Herman [00:36:23]:
So to your previous guest point, create the content, get out there and start doing it. Start seeing what's working. What is driving reach primarily is the biggest metric of success on Instagram is reach, because people may swipe through a carousel and not throw up a like, may not share, may not save, but they consumed it. People may click dot, dot, dot more and read your whole caption, but not take any other metric that we can measure. And Instagram does not give us a lot of metrics. So reach tells you how many people saw that post. And if you find out my baseline is a reach of 1000 and you start getting posts that are reaching 2000, 3000, those are the positive outliers. What was different about those that you can recreate when you get something that has an average reach of 400 when your baseline is 1000? Well, what did you do wrong? Was it not valuable content? Did you go off script? Was it the wrong time of year, month, whatever? Like, you start picking apart over time, but you have to have content to get a baseline.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:25]:
I love that because it makes it so, like, you have to keep creating content and then you might not know the twelve month content strategy because you're just looking at these little pockets of like, oh, we actually, we made this reel. This reel had 2000 views. We've never made a reel that had 2000 views. Let's blow up the content strategy. And then it just becomes this game of like, recreate the hits, right? That's what's so valuable about social media from a business standpoint. As you know, it just becomes this feedback loop. But the challenge is you have to accept that, right? Don't get on Instagram to be like, well, we've been doing it for four weeks and we have no sales.
Jenn Herman [00:37:56]:
Right? And you have to think to your point about the year. Like, it takes a long time to get multiple years worth of data and you'll start to learn over time. Oh, we always get a really low engagement and really low distribution in May. Why? Oh, well, this. Or if most of your customers are based in Europe and they all disappear and go off on vacation for a month at a time because your primary audience is european does your engagement go up or go down? Right, because they're on vacation. They're maybe on their phones more. Maybe they're on vacation. So they're not working.
Jenn Herman [00:38:27]:
They're not on their phones. Like, you start to see these ebbs and flows and then you craft your content around that as well. Know that they're going to have low engagement in the month of June. Don't run a sales campaign in June. But you don't know that until you're creating the content that you can then adapt as you go forward.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:46]:
Yes. All right. Awesome. Jenn, people should go and check out your instagram. She's Jenn's underscore trends. Jenn's trends. Two ends. Jenn.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:53]:
There you go. That's a genius. Branding on your own. You're already unique because you're. Yeah. To ngen. And then go send her a message or connect with her on LinkedIn. This is great.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:02]:
I got a ton out of this. I makes me want to be like, man, we got to go revisit our strategy for Exit Five with LinkedIn, Jenn, but thank you for doing this. I hope somebody sends you a message in a couple of weeks and is like, yeah, listen, this episode with Jenn and we're going to go and try something for Instagram. I do think it's, even though there's 2 billion monthly users, I think it's actually still untapped for B2B. And you must feel this way all the time. It's why you create content around it, right?
Jenn Herman [00:39:23]:
Absolutely. It's totally viable. It's totally valuable. Again, you're not going to reach hundreds of thousands of people just by posting something. Not that you can't. You can go viral. I have a client that her first reel went absolutely viral, has like 300,000 views on it. And she was like, what is this? And of course, she's never done it again since.
Jenn Herman [00:39:39]:
But you can reach those mass audiences, but really it's about reaching your audience where they are and being able to connect with them in the right way.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:47]:
Well, that's what's cool about the opportunity for B2B, right? We're not talking about, like, selling, you know, t shirts here. It's like you might only need to get a to customers.
Jenn Herman [00:39:54]:
You got a couple leads off Instagram and you could have your coffer filled for your sales goal. It's when you start looking at what those translations are, one lead could be a hundred thousand dollar client.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:06]:
Yep. All right, Jenn, thanks for hanging out with us on the Exit Five podcast. I appreciate it. I appreciate you I'm now following all your stuff, and I'll be tuned in to tune up our Instagram. Awesome.