Matt Hoaglin Social Media Q and A – Episode 020 – A Photographer Podcast Interview

You don’t want to miss this podcast! Matt is teaching at PPA Idaho in Boise, so he bounces ideas off of and asks for Kia’s perspective on social media so get prepared for his program. They start with goals, like brand awareness and how you measure that. Matt runs Facebook and Instagram ads to current customers, in addition to new potential and repeat customers. Listen in to find out how and why. Matt suggests you audit the platforms you use to make sure the voice matches your brand. They also get into retargeting. If someone goes to Allison Ragsdale Photography, once they leave the website, Matt can set things up where they’ll see ads on Facebook and Instagram to download our free guides. Which leads them to discussing lead magnets. Kia brings up how actually creating the lead magnet or the content creation can be the stop so Matt suggests using templates and writing prompts. Then you have to make a plan and schedule your posts. Last, but before you start, figure out how you’re going to track your results.

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Transcription was done by Temi.com which means it’s an AI generated transcript. The transcript may contain spelling, grammar and other errors, and is not a substitute for watching the video.

Matt: [00:01] Everybody, this is Matt Hoagland and you’re listening to from nothing to profit.

Speaker 2: [00:05] Welcome to from nothing to profit, a photographer’s podcast with Matt and Kayak where each week they talk to photographers about what is working in their business now so you can swipe those ideas and grow your business faster.

Matt: [00:21] All right guys, so here’s the deal. This is going to be a little bit of a different podcast and hopefully people give us feedback whether they like these kind of random conversations. You and I have an or if they definitely want us to do many, many more interviews with people, but I was putting together this outline because I’m speaking at pep a Idaho and they actually gave me a huge time slot to talk about social media. So I put together an outline and I kind of want to just some of your feedback to see how you think about some of these things as well. So yeah, if I can bounce ideas off of you, that would be awesome because I think people, people will definitely get a lot from this. Okay. So the first big idea that I wanted to talk about is like kind of goal setting for social media and here’s, here’s how I think about that.

Matt: [01:07] Your social media goals need to be aligned with your company goals. So there’s kind of three types of types of goals that I think about. Like one of them is just brand awareness goals, like you’re just trying to get seen. Then there’s the goal of getting new leads and customers are. Then there’s the goal of retaining existing customers. So there’s icing. I think there’s only three I can think of, but what I see a lot of people do with their goals around social media as they, their goals only live in social media. So like they’re like I want 10,000 likes, that’s a social social media goal and they don’t necessarily connect that to a business goal. Does that make sense?

Kia: [01:45] Yeah, I think that’s really good because like right now I’m working on putting together my goals for the year and I. and so we’ve been discussing the fact that most of our goals are like achievement goals. Like, you know, like you said, 10,000 followers or likes or you know, booking this many sessions and they’re all like achievement goals and we don’t get rewarded very quickly with that. And so I would definitely like to know, like how, what are other ways of like evaluating what you’re doing to see if it’s working for you or other ways of looking at it to see if it’s working for you. So yeah, that’s good. I like that.

Matt: [02:26] Yeah. And I mean because at the end of this program I was going to talk about like how we can like have key performance indicators to figure out if this stuff is working and stuff for sure. But you know, I just think social media goals, I think the first idea is social media goals have to be aligned with your business goals.

Kia: [02:42] Okay. So what’s an example like that? Like so of each of those.

Matt: [02:47] Okay. So like if you, if you’re just wanting to get seen, right? You just want your brand out there so people see it. Then what you do on social media may be different, may have different calls to actions or you may have been doing different things with your clients to get to get seen, right? If you’re just brand awareness, you may say, Hey, one of our goals is to get one of our seniors to post on our behalf every week or something like that. Oh, okay. I like that we’re getting new leads or customers that call to action may be, you know, book a free planning session, you know, pick up the phone and call the call to action I think is different. So if your business goal is to get more customers, you may have to do social media a little bit differently and then retaining existing customers is a completely different goal, right?

Matt: [03:30] You maybe you’re just posting pictures of people you’ve already taken and that makes them feel good. You know, there’s, we do and we do an ad campaign. We did this really crazy thing and social media. Let me go down this rabbit hole real quick. So as people, as people are going through our, whatever the word I’m looking for, going through our system right from, from the beginning consultation all the way through ordering and picking up their pictures. There are different steps, right? So like we, the first step is we have to get them ready for the consultation and then we have to get them ready for the session and then we have to get them ready for the order appointment and then we have to get them ready to pick up their stuff and leave us a review. So there’s different stages and we actually run campaigns on facebook that helped them see that.

Matt: [04:13] So and so we have ads that we run on facebook when they’re looking at when they’re getting ready for their consultation. We do a lot of inspirational slideshows or we’ll do like little videos of sessions so they just get excited about it. But when they go, when they get ready for their session, we’ll do a lot of ads that are around like our what to wear guide or you know, in our pictures that point out, you know, certain things are props and things as well. So like the message changes and then when they get ready to order what they see with our ad campaigns is they see like Walmart and things like that and we can actually running ads to the people who’ve already booked with you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so the idea, it’s so, so interesting. So I did it as a task because I went to, I think I was at traffic and conversion summit in San Francisco a couple years ago and they were like, we should do this because you just use custom audiences on facebook and instagram and if people want to know more about it, they can reach out to me.

Matt: [05:12] But what they said, you know, we do this like subliminal marketing to these people. And so I tried it. I was like, just what the order, right. I was like, okay, I’m going to put together a short video, you know, not no words, just music and just show them a bunch of wall art in our studio and see what happens. And so I ran the ad and I just saw, you know, people were liking it and people were watching it and like, you know, just the normal phase facebook statistics and then people started coming in for their order and they’re like, you know, somewhere I saw, you know, a picture that looked like this and they, they didn’t realize that they even saw it on facebook because they’re just scrolling through it. Then I’m like, oh, like this? And they’re like, yeah, that’s the one I want, that’s what I want. And they like came more prepared for their order. And so now I’ve kind of done that for different stages. The order in one is by far the most effective, but we just tried to like hit them in as many places as possible. Right. We talk to them on the phone and we email them about this stuff. But now I’m also trying to do the same messaging on facebook and Instagram, so they see it there as well.

Kia: [06:11] Huh. That’s really interesting. So do you find that that like rather than just sending them an email with the information that them getting an ad is like making the order better?

Matt: [06:25] Well yeah, because you’re all, all we’re doing with those ads is just educating them that there’s possibilities because people don’t know how to. People don’t know how to shop photography. Right. So we’ll just get. We’re just giving them ads and I’m not going to run. I don’t want to spend a million dollars front end that facebook ad to a bunch of strangers that are interested in photography. But if I had a cat, if I have a captured audience and I can run wall our ads or album ads to those people and it increases my sales by a certain percentage. It’s worth it all day long. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. Because most people know. Yeah, most people have never seen that. I don’t even know that they can do these amazing albums and you know, so if I can, if I can show them on facebook as well as showing them when I’m at our studio, it’s just a win win.

Matt: [07:05] Yeah. Okay. Cool. Okay. So I don’t know if we’re going to get through all of this, but it must be sorry. No, it’s good because I just really want your feedback and hopefully we have these nuggets that will help the audience as well. So the second part, as I said, like what’s, what is possible, so I was gonna have them audit their platform url on each platform, each social media platform, audit their followers out of their competition and their audit, their current strategy. So I think the main one doing all those platforms. Well I’m just saying because everybody’s business is different. Right? And so they usually

Kia: [07:41] and tell them to choose their top two platforms or something. Because to me I’d be like, I have to ask all these questions about all these platforms. And so, you know, if you take five times, one, two, three, four, five, six, you know, like your, your ended up with like 30 questions. Sure. So I think you should tell them, pick your top one or two platforms and audit those. Okay. And so here’s the idea. You should add pinterest.

Matt: [08:08] Okay, perfect. So here’s the idea behind behind the audit, the platform as I think. I think we just get, I don’t know if we get lazy or we just get confused or complacent or what the word is, but subconsciously we know that certain platforms are used for certain things. And we talked about this when we, you and I interviewed when I interviewed you about instagram and that there’s certain platforms for certain things. So like Linkedin is the obvious one, right? Like it’s very business centered. It’s used for that. But what happens I think sometimes is that we get lazy and we put instagram content like on facebook and it doesn’t mean so like I just want to. Yeah. So I just want to spend a few minutes and saying like what are, what is the purpose of these platforms? You know, what’s the purpose of facebook, twitter, instagram, linkedin, snapchat, pinterest, whatever. They all are, I, what’s the purpose of it? Why are people there? And then what’s the voice of the platform? Because you and I have talked about this. I don’t know if we’ve actually pointed it out or not, but the voice on snapchat is like very catty and very funny and like there’s a lot of people that just don’t resonate with it. Like when it comes to brands like your brand, your brand may not fit their. Yeah.

Kia: [09:20] Yeah. It definitely doesn’t work with my brand because my brand is happy and cheerful and that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. I see that.

Matt: [09:27] And so you know, you’re not going to put dog ears on, you know, that doesn’t work with what, what you’re trying to do and necessarily so, so. So anyways, I want them to look at the platform. I also want them to look at their followers like who’s already there, who’s already resonating with what they’re doing. Like, you know, just getting some insights about who is actually following them. There’s some really cool tools like you can do like a 15 day trial of sprout social and it basically does like a whole audit on your, on your social media platforms and produces all kinds of really cool insights. If you don’t want to do the free trial, you don’t want to pay for it. You can also do, um, just the insights that are inside of instagram or facebook. It has lots of information for you and then they can look at their competition and that’s kind of a slippery slope. But then I also want them just to audit their current strategy. Now since they’ve thought about the platform and thought about who their followers, I want them to look at their social, their current strategy and say, is it working? Is it not? This is where you’ve enlightened me is they’re kind of like auditing their aesthetic on their platform and saying, am I actually doing what’s native to the platform and native to my brand, you know?

Kia: [10:33] Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And I think especially because photography is such a visual, it’s a visual product and so if you, if, if it doesn’t connect with the, the, with your brand and with the platform you’re putting it on, then people are not going to be drawn to it, they’re going to be confused and uncomfortable with it.

Matt: [10:54] Right. Okay. So then the next thing is like ideas of what they could do. And so we’re talking about like how know stories and just posting in general and this concept of retargeting which is super powerful. So let me explain the retargeting for audience real quick. Yeah, you got to do. That was going to be my question. Okay. So retargeting, it’s the idea of like some people call it cookies and all these other things on the internet, but like if somebody goes and you’ve seen this happen, you go to a website and then all of a sudden their ads follow you around on social media forever. Not Forever, but know

Kia: [11:27] for sure. If I look up a pair of snow boots, I’m fine. Snow boots everywhere I go.

Matt: [11:32] Yeah, exactly. So it’s very easy to set that up and so I just want to make, make people aware that that’s something you can do in your business and it’s something that we do in our business and we focused really heavily on that like a couple of years ago and that was one of our best years that we’ve ever had and I need to read and we’d really took a year off not doing it a well of a job on it, but I needed to do a better job of setting up retargeting ads. So if someone does go to my website then we chased them down trying to get them to download our like what to wear guide or something like that or our location guide so that we can actually do that through through

Kia: [12:06] Google or facebook or

Matt: [12:09] we do it through facebook and instagram are the easiest ones to set up. You can do it through Google as well, but we just do facebook and instagram because it’s really easy. And so we just make an ad that says an ad that’s like a what to wear guide ad com. Com download our guide and we just chase them down for like 10 days after they visit our site. So okay. So then that leads me into just talking to people about like this concept of lead magnets or what to wear guides and things that they can create that people can download and the whole purpose of that is to, in marketing is trying to get somebody to raise their hand to show you that they’re interested because.

Kia: [12:43] So let’s talk about and lead magnets a little bit. So what is a lead magnet?

Matt: [12:47] Yeah, so it’s like a, it’s a downloadable. It’s like one of those that’s like a, a pdf or a video somebody can watch. They can basically trade their information for free for some kind of resource that gives them value. So the two most, the two most common we use our which were guides and location guides.

Kia: [13:04] Okay. So let me ask you a question about this because like when I think about making one, I’m just like, Ugh, I wish I had a template of someone else’s that I could copy. When I’ve downloaded templates of other people’s. When I do it, it’s, I just, it’s just like, like what would you say is like the way to do it, like would you say open up a document in pages or photoshop or whatever and then just just start putting it together. Like how does that make sense? Like I feel like a lot of times for me it’s just the actual physical making, the, the what to wear guide or whatever it is that it just is my stop like keeps me from doing that repeatedly.

Matt: [13:47] Right. And so I have like people can purchase my templates and I’ll leave a link to that below as well if they want to a starting point. So to me it’s basically like what question is my, my audience asking and then what are the answers and I just put that on a page, you know. So it’s like what should I wear to senior pictures? Yeah. And then within there is like the do’s and the don’ts and then like what color should I wear, you know, like warm tones, cool tones and then give them some ideas of different looks that they can go with. You know, just kind of give them names so they’re like, oh, I, you know, I actually liked that look and now I know what it’s called and I can talk about it. Okay. So I just,

Kia: [14:27] when you do that, do you feel like it, like there’s a vow, like the single sheet versus a 10 or a 50 page pdf or video, what do you think the best size is?

Matt: [14:42] Yeah, so I think ours are like 14 to 16 pages, but half of them, half of them are just full size images, you know, because half of it’s our portfolio, half of it’s helping them answer questions. Okay. Yeah. So how often do you update those? I don’t know. Every couple of years when we get bored with the pictures, but it’s way more about us than, than them then their clients, their clients are going to be happy with it because it’s, it’s very general. Not necessarily super specific like what you should wear in 2019. Right, exactly. And so we have um, so we have one for high school seniors, girls, high school senior boys. We have one for families, one for headshots and one for what am I missing? Like babies or something, maybe engagement. So that’s what we have. Okay. So, so there and the information is almost identical.

Matt: [15:30] We just change out the pictures and there’s a few tweaks that you have to do to the content, but for the most part like the do’s and don’ts of the same. Right. Don’t wear wrinkled clothes to those session, you know? Yeah. Okay. So when you’re doing that so that you can get their email. Yeah. I mean it’s. So it’s multiple, multiple purposes. It can. The main goal is when someone is looking for a photo session, the one of the very first things they want to talk about is what to wear. And so I wanted to be able to give them the resource to answer one of the early questions so that they raised...