A Proven Instagram Strategy for Business Growth

0:00Ellen Mackenzie: I'm Mari Smith, known as the premier Facebook marketing expert, aka Queen of Facebook, and this is actually my 14th time because I have been at every single social media marketing world. There is no amount of sophisticated technology that can ever take the place of live, in-person, IRL, heart-to-heart, face-to-face. You could very well meet some of your best friends, clients, joint venture partners, alliances, have opportunities, podcasts, speaking engagements. It's extraordinary. So come on in for this beautiful in-person experience. Get tickets at socialmediamarketingworld.info

0:37Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads, and more sales. Now, before we get into today's episode all about Instagram, I just wanted to share that I'm doing a brand new series called Mike's Thoughts from the Porch, and you can find them on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and also on our YouTube channel for Social Media Examiner.

1:18If you're following me on any of these platforms, you will see they're just daily little three minute direct-to-camera videos of me sharing my thoughts from the front porch first thing in the morning, birds chirping, water falling down the gutter as the rain is coming and all that fun stuff. And it's my experiment with direct-to-camera, unedited, short, thoughtful videos just on little tips and stuff like that. So if you want a little bit more from me, and I know you're used to hearing from my guests, then consider following me and checking it out. Also, if you're new to this podcast. Be sure to follow this show so you don't miss any future content.

1:52Let's transition over to this week's special guest. Helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today we'll explore a proven strategy to grow on Instagram. My special guest is an Instagram strategist, author, and coach who helps female entrepreneurs grow their businesses. Her podcast is Ditching Up Digital. Ellen McKenzie, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. Excited to be here. Excited to talk about Instagram. Super excited to have you. So let's start with your story. How did you get into Instagram? I have a very vivid memory of my first Instagram post.

2:29I was still in high school. I was my second to last year of high school. And at that point, I didn't have a smartphone. So I stole my dad's like tablet, his iPad that he used for work, downloaded Instagram because I was like, this is what everyone's talking about at school. Like I got to be on this app. And I posted a picture of my, my home manicure with this like deep sepia filter. And that was kind of the beginning of it all. But for me, Instagram was that, that passion project, that hobby that I had through school and university. My sister and I ran a fashion blog. It was our, you know, money that funded our holidays and our adventures.

3:06And yeah, it was always just this fun thing that I kind of stumbled into monetizing. And for me, my goal was always to be a journalist. That was my portfolio, if you will. And I never really had this interest in marketing. I was like, no, I want to tell stories. I want to work in magazines. Like this is the dream. So I used Instagram and my blog as like my portfolio is leveraged to get that dream job. And spoiler alert, I got there and I was like, oh, I don't like this corporate life. Like, what do you mean someone has to tell me when I'm allowed to go have lunch? And, you know, someone gets to approve my annual leave.

3:39So I worked for three years and as a magazine journalist and had the very glamorous life of going to red carpet premieres and interviewing celebrities and reviewing movies and all that fun stuff and kind of decided to bow out and, you know, change my career. And that was when I realized how much I loved Instagram, social media, and I actually loved digital marketing and the analytics behind it and the strategy behind it. And I'd kind of unknowingly been doing that for years. And I thought, huh, I wonder if other businesses would like me to do this for them. And sure enough, two months later, I was making a good couple of thousand dollars, which was mind blowing for like a underpaid journalist.

4:21What year was this by the way, when you, when you were starting? This would have been 2017, 2018 was when I first sort of started dabbling in sort of monetizing it. And 2019 was when I kind of like launched my side hustle. And then 10 months later, I was able to quit my job. Awesome. So tell us what you're doing now. Obviously it worked out pretty well. It did. I managed to kind of hustle my way into building this business and I'm still here now, what, six, seven years later, I basically built up my own agency, Dishing Up Digital. And from there, I started pivoting into online courses, digital products, and I still do social media management.

5:05It's my first love, I always say. I work with around one or two businesses a year. And then from there, I also work with brand partnerships, UGC ads, as I said, the digital products and courses. And I really have what I call like a hybrid creative business where I just get to create content on social media and somehow call it a job. Absolutely love it. So you have been going down this Instagram path for what feels like almost a decade, right? I mean, maybe even more than a decade. So you probably have seen just about everything. And I'm just curious from your perspective, what do you see as one of the big misconceptions that people hold when it comes to Instagram and content creation these days?

5:46Oh my gosh, how much time do we have? We've got a long list. Yeah. No, I thinking back, it was 2012 was the year that I posted first on Instagram. And I think over that time, I have seen so many imaginary rules, so many myths about Instagram pop up. You know, you've got to post at this specific time. You've got to have five hashtags. Wait, no, you don't have any hashtags or put your hashtags in your comments. If you put them in your caption, you'll tank your post or make sure you're real seven seconds. No, make sure it's 60 seconds. And the whiplash we face as, as business owners on Instagram, it really is exhausting.

6:20And the other day I, I follow Adam Masseri. He's kind of like your source of truth. If you want to know anything about Instagram myths. And he was talking about this myth around, if you edit a post, people have always said, oh, if you post something, don't edit it because it will tank in the algorithm. And I've, you know, followed that rule myself for a couple of years, you know, cause you want to do anything you possibly can to try and make your post perform better. And he came out recently and he was like, I have no idea where this came from. Like, this isn't a thing. Like our algorithm, like if you've got a typo in your post, please just go fix it.

6:53And I was like, wow, like I wish you'd told us that maybe, you know, five, six years ago, that would have helped a lot. Very cool. So what we're going to talk about today really is your high level view and strategy on specifically how to, how to do Instagram well. And I'm personally extremely interested in this for reasons I'll share a little bit more later, but when Instagram content is done really well and people pay close attention to what we're going to be talking about today, what will they be able to unlock? What's waiting for them on the other side, if you will? I always think I'm a prime example of this.

7:24You know, 99 % of the people listening today have tuned into this podcast, probably have no idea who I am. I'm a random girl who lives at the bottom of the world in this tiny country, New Zealand. And somehow I've built this million dollar business. I've done over a million dollars in revenue and my main traffic sources are social media or my only traffic sources, really. You won't see me on a billboard. You won't see me on a TV ad. It's all on social media. And I think what's so cool is there's hundreds of thousands of other people just like me who have these little freelance kind of agency businesses that they've started with zero capital.

8:00They've just decided to start an Instagram account. And now they're generating, you know, like I'm making five times my corporate salary and that just blows my mind. Like I never thought that was something I'd be able to achieve, but that is the upside. If you just focus on doing social media and being consistent and showing up, which I'm sure we'll talk about today, that is what is the reward on the other side. And it's not necessarily about going super viral and being the next viral sensation, but there is an entire life you can build for yourself. And the money out there is truly life-changing for a lot of people.

8:37Love it. Okay. So we're here to talk about Instagram. And before we get into this strategy that we're going to unveil today, what I'd like to do is ask if there's anything that we need to talk about before we get into the strategy, any groundwork that we need to lay, like for example, what's going on with the algorithm? I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Algorithm changes is a big one, especially in 2026. And again, I've been in this space for a decade. I feel like I've seen every evolution come and go. I often joke about posting my first reel. It had no audio. It was like, that looked like it had been filmed on a potato because I'd exported the settings wrong.

9:13Like I've seen all of these new features come and go with social media. But 2026 has been one of the biggest years of change, in my opinion, being on social media, nothing really feels the same anymore. And a lot of that is driven by AI and AI generated content. It's so easy for businesses to make content now. And don't get me wrong. I'm the biggest AI fan out there. I love it. But I do think, you know, because it's easier to make content, people are making more. And I think, sadly, we're seeing this slip in the quality of content. And you can see that in the numbers. We have record low engagement levels on Instagram.

9:50Historically, engagement has gone down year on year for the last five or so years. But it's like it's continuing to dip. And I do think, you know, audiences aren't engaging with content as much because they're questioning, oh, is this AI generated? Or, you know, it's not resonating with them because someone hasn't been, you know, feeding their AI, their thoughts and their opinions. They're just getting that generic output. And I think that's a huge contributor to why the algorithm feels really tough for business owners right now. And the other thing to consider is trial reels. That has completely changed how the algorithm works.

10:23I think, you know, Instagram kind of launched it quite quietly and you've got a lot of creators and a lot of marketing specialists going, yeah, this is a really cool opportunity. And it is, you know, I now AB test all my trial reels, all my reels on trial reels so that I can get really strategic and make sure like, oh, is this word going to like trigger more of a response from my audience? Or is this the hook that they resonate with more? And it's a really cool kind of playground that we now have with Instagram. But the downside of that is again, we've got the second layer of it's so easy to make more content.

10:58It's easier to just post five reels a day. Like I had an ad pop up just yesterday from someone saying, download my digital product and learn how to make 111 trial reels in 45 minutes. And I just looked at that. I'm like, how, how do business owners compete with that? Right? Like we've actually got, we're not influencers. We've got businesses to run. We've probably got team members to manage or products to develop. And you have someone who's posting 100 reels in 45 minutes. And that is where businesses are posting now. And they've seen that dip in reach. And it feels like this fight with the algorithm to get any sort of view or any traction on their content.

11:36And it's simply that the algorithm has kind of been overrun with content. Like there's so many people posting and there's so many people posting more frequently than they used to, which is making it a really tricky landscape. And as I said, I've always been someone who's sat up and been like, guys, let's not complain about the algorithm. Let's just focus on making better content. And this is the first year that I feel like I've had to eat my words a little bit and be like, maybe there is a tough playing field at the moment. Maybe there is a bit of a disadvantage. And that's not to say Instagram is dead or it doesn't work.

12:10It's still my primary platform driving revenue in my own business. And I see that with my clients and with the students that I coach. but we just need to make sure we're understanding and we're aware of these changes so that we can adapt our own strategy. Awesome. Is there anything else we need to think about before we get started here? I think with that, I always love talking about mindset. Anyone who's come over from my podcast knows that we have like Alan's mindset round in the middle of every episode, even when we're talking about strategy, you know, managing these algorithm changes can be a lot for business owners, it can feel a bit demoralizing.

12:45I think as human, as humans, we do have a tendency to look at likes and followers and reach and engagement. And it makes us feel good. We're like, oh my gosh, we've got 10 ,000 views. Like, woo, like celebrate the day. How great is life? And then we have the opposite feeling when we get a hundred views, 200 views. We're like, we suck. We should quit our business. Nobody likes us. And we tend to have the spiral. At least I do. At least I do. So I think it's really important to have a little bit of distance from your social media metrics. And when you go into your insights, put on your data specialist hat and analyze it.

13:20It's not like, oh my gosh, my views are down. Everybody hates me. I suck. It's, huh? Okay. My content isn't resonating at the moment. How could we tweak that? How could we adjust that? So just really monitoring your mindset and also making sure that's not leaking into your content. If you have this attitude of Instagram sucks, everything's annoying, everything's too hard. You're probably going to show up to film your next reel and be like, Hey guys. Um, so I have this new launch. Yeah. Like I'd love it if you check it out versus that person that shows up with the energy and excitement, who's actually going to have higher performing reels.

13:53I love it. Okay. So here's what I'm hearing you say. First of all, the algorithm is overwhelmed by all the AI video, which is called AI slot by a lot of people in the AI space. And that is making it hard because there's a lot of content coming into the algorithm them and it's trying to discern good from bad. And the other thing I heard you said is, hey, you're not going to have a home run on every single piece of content that you run. But if you look at it as an opportunity to learn from it and analyze it and say, okay, what is it about the ones that are performing? And what is it about the ones that are underperforming?

14:28What can I learn from it? Right. And constantly be a student and treat everything as an experiment. Did I hear that properly? A hundred percent. Yeah. Bang on. Love it. Okay, good. So now let's start with, Where do we start? Now that we've set these kind of ground rules, which are really helpful, where should we begin when it comes to creating great content on Instagram? Well, you've got it right there. It all begins with the content. I think we can get tricky around strategies like your trial reels and your paid ads and all of these other layers. But if you don't have that foundational content in place, you're not going to be able to like inject that ad spend or accelerate with, you know, other, you know, strategies.

15:06You have to make sure you are giving that time and energy to your content. And for me, like at the moment, I am using AI to help me produce my content because again, I'm a big Claude fan. I call her Claudette in this house and she's my bestie. Love Claude. I love Claude also. Yeah. Yeah. Big fan as well. But I think what people get wrong is, again, just putting in a simple prompt and taking that generic answer. Whereas I've trained my Claude to know everything about me and my business. It's studied like everything that I've spoken about in the past five years. It's got that knowledge. And then when I'm talking to it, I'm saying, Hey, this is a conversation I had with a student or a client, or this is something that's really ticked me off on Instagram at the moment.

15:50And I'm coming to it with ideas and opinions. Then it's helping me take my rant, if you will, and formulate it into something that's a little bit more juicy. and for me that's been the game changer because it's made content a little bit lighter and I think a lot of business owners are looking for that but I'm still very collaborative there's backwards and forth it's like okay at Claude you've given me five options I think I kind of like the first two but like let's do better and it's it's like for me recreating what I did in the newsroom in my magazine job you know we'd all sit down with our stories to present for the week and be like is what we're working on.

16:26And we'd be like chatting backwards and forth. Like my editor would be like, no, like cut that sentence. That's shit, Ellen. Like, you know, everyone was quite brutally honest with each other. And I think we need to be that kind of have that sort of honesty with ourself and say, we, we need to make sure that we're, we're not just putting up the first draft and we need to make sure we're evolving and we're, we're editing that content and we're putting that time, energy and love into it. And I think the other thing to consider here is we're seeing a lot of people that are maybe just copying what they see is doing well in the algorithm.

17:02Like, oh, there's a viral reel, copy paste, put it on my page with my video or my face. And again, I really encourage my clients and my students to get out of that mindset and start your ideation by thinking about your customers and your community. And like, that's where your content idea should come from, not from an algorithm or not from what's trending. Like, yes, you could take the content idea that you got from a customer review or like a email exchange with a client. You could take that and then you could package it into a trend. You know, you could take a format that's trending at the moment and put it in there.

17:37But those truly high performing reels, they're often coming from people's human experiences because that's what it is at the end of the day. And that's why I always come back to my journalism days, because for me, that's the experience coming through. It's just, it's storytelling. It's connecting with other humans. That's what social media is. It's literally social media. So often we have to focus on putting the social back in social media. A fabulous example of this at the moment is Jessie Jean. Have you been following her YAP challenge at all? Well, yeah, before we even get into this, I want to just share a little story with you because I'm curious and I want to share this with all of my community.

18:13Today is July 14th while we're recording this. This probably won't be out for a little while, but I have recorded eight days in a row on my front porch. Wow. And I'm just calling it Mike's thoughts from the porch. And literally I just turn on the camera and I talk. I do it in less than three minutes. I do not edit anything. It is just pure thoughts from my mind. Now I have the ability to communicate as people can imagine. And I've got some skills and stuff that I developed over the years. But I am just every day committed to for the next 30 days to just record these Mike thoughts from the porch.

18:47And I'm posting them on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube shorts, and LinkedIn. And it's just been so fun because you mentioned be human. Well, I'm just sharing stories and insights and I'm trying to make it completely authentic. there is absolutely zero edits, nothing. Like, like literally I'm going direct from my phone to upload and they're all short and they're all like three minutes long. And I feel like this is going to tie into Jesse and what you're talking about. But the reason I'm doing this is because I feel like what you feel, which is people want to hear from humans and people want to trust is the most important thing right now and completely unedited, unscripted.

19:30I feel like it's kind of like the next big thing. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on this. And I know this is going to tie into what you're about to talk about next. Yeah, I a hundred percent agree. And I was scrolling reels the other day and came across this video of a guy talking to camera. And he had this perfectly styled hair with this little like curl dropping down and it's like buttoned up shirt. And immediately I look at it and I'm like, Oh, this is super high res. Is this AI? And I'm like zooming in, trying to find a paw on his face. And I go to the comments and the comments, there's hundreds of other people going, is this AI generated?

20:01Is this a real human? Like everyone's like questioning it. And it's funny because I could not tell you the name of that creator or their business, or even what that video was about. The only thing I remembered was questioning, is this AI generated? And then that person lost me. Like they completely lost me from the message they were trying to communicate. And I think that's a huge thing that's happening in the algorithm at the moment. You know, I, I love my big fancy cameras. Like I love my DSLR camera. I love my Sonys. I love my Canons. Like I'm a friend to wall cameras and I have to put those away.

20:32I have to be like, Ellen, no one wants to see you in HD right now, especially on Instagram or any sort of short form content. They want to see the raw. They want to see the off the cuff. They want to see exactly what you're doing. Like sitting down on that front deck, on that patio, being like, Hey, I can hear the birds in the background. I'm wearing a baseball cap because I just woke up. It's first thing in the morning. And it's legitimately like, like I film it at 5.50 in the morning, every morning, literally as the birds and sometimes it's raining and you can hear the rain coming down the gutter and stuff like that.

21:00I just feel like there's something there. I don't know. Yeah. And, and Jesse Jean, I was talking about earlier is the prime example of someone who's spotted that trend quite early and she's just accelerated and similar to you, you know, she'd been in business for over a decade. She's had several businesses in different niches and worlds. So she knows, she knows her stuff. Like she knows how to talk. She knows how to present herself on camera. And she's taken those skills and just rocked up and, you know, like her sweatpants, her hoodie, she's propped her phone up on a desk. And it feels like you're on FaceTime with a friend who just so happens to be extremely eloquent and pulling you in the way that she speaks.

21:36Yeah. And it's called the Yap Challenge, right? And this kind of, everybody's talking about it right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And her Yap Challenge, again, we're coming back to the opportunities and what's possible on Instagram. I think her running total at the moment from the last two months and two launches is she's done over 7 million US dollars in sales. And that's everybody signing up for her YAP challenge, which I think number one is so cool to see what's possible for, you know, businesses at the moment and, you know, the potential of selling on socials. But number two, it shows you that demand, right?

22:08How many people are like, yeah, I just want to talk on camera and tell my story. And I want to hear that from other people. And I think that's why her particular program has just popped off and it's done so well is because there's this huge craving for that authenticity. People are over the perfection. They're over the curation. And we're seeing that kind of die out on Instagram right now. Hi, my name is Mandy Hedrick and I'm here at Social Media Marketing World. My first time attending Social Media Marketing World and I had won my ticket. And so I attended online and the impact it had in what I could do for my business immediately.

22:47It was my goal as a business owner to be able to earmark the dollars. This is my second time in person. So I just love being in a room full of people that are like-minded. It's a big investment, but I'm not just investing in myself, but I'm also investing in my clients. And I will be coming back every single year. I'm already ready to buy my next ticket and book my hotel room. Get tickets at socialmediamarketingworld.info. Any tips on, you know, how in the world we can, you know, be more human and all that kind of fun stuff? Because I think a lot of people are probably thinking to themselves, oh, I can actually, I can actually record something of value that's not super long, but maybe they're scared, right?

23:31So any thoughts on how to do that well? One of my favorite strategies at the moment with Reels is we have this tendency as humans, And maybe not for you, Mike, because you've been doing this for quite a few years. You're like, ah, camera, that doesn't faze me. But a lot of us, you put a camera and we freeze. And I was experiencing this with a client recently and he's so charismatic. Like he is the most charismatic dude. And I put the camera on and he froze and he started talking. I'm like, bro, why are you talking like that? That's not your voice. Because he's not talking to a human. He's talking to a lens and there's a difference.

24:01So one of my favorite tips at the moment, which I'm actually doing right now, is I have my phone recording our podcast today. just off to the side to potentially pull out a couple of 30 second sound bites because it's me having a conversation, really getting into the flow of it instead of remembering that I'm on camera, like I'm talking to someone. So that's something I do a lot with clients and they just put your camera off to the side. If you're a florist, put your camera off to the side and start, you know, making your next arrangement. And then maybe when you're a minute into it, you could be like, you know what?

24:32I love this flower. Like this is a flower that I use in all my arrangements at the moment and blah, blah, blah. You might talk about its origins or, you know, whatever your, your zone of genius, your expertise is. And the other thing I love to do is I can, like you put my video and my camera down and just film for three minutes talking about a subject. When I go to edit it, I often cut out the first 30, sometimes even more 30 seconds of, of the video, because I'm like, I can see myself sitting up being like, hi everyone today, we're going to talk about. And I put on this persona, which is so what we're used to doing on social media.

25:07You know, my cousin always jokes that I almost have a bit of an American accent, which you would probably be like, no way, Ellen, you're in New Zealand through and through. But she picks it up. She's like, your voice is different when you film versus when you're actually speaking to me. It becomes way more Kiwi and I really lose my pronunciation of my vowels as we do in New Zealand. So it's, it's often that trimming off the beginning. I actually start sometimes like mid sentence in a video, but it feels a bit more organic and natural. And that's something that I've only started implementing recently.

25:40And I'm really liking the results from that. Any other thoughts on kinds of content? Cause we've obviously talked about reels, but that's not all that we can produce here, right? Because not everybody necessarily feels comfortable doing video. There's other things that they could be doing as well. what other kinds of content could we be creating potentially? Yes. I really hope anyone who hates Reels hasn't clicked out of this episode yet. It's really only one content format. And actually for me at the moment, my highest performing content is carousels. So I know we've spent a lot of time talking about Reels and for me, they are so important for creating trust and there is good growth exposure there with the Reels explore page and trial Reels and all of those things.

26:22But carousels for me, again, I'm basically embracing a similar vibe or energy or aesthetic, whatever you want to call it, where my carousels have gone from these very curated, perfect canvas slides to these very casual, candid, off the cuff photos from my phone. Again, not on the fancy camera. And they've just got text over the top. And one of my favorite creators who I think has done this really well is Friends That Invest. And she's obviously in the world of investing. If anyone wants to go look at her Instagram is a prime example of someone who's just making content that feels like it's just like your bestie, right?

26:57And ironically, her community, she refers to her audience as the investie besties. And she has such an intimate relationship with them. Even though she's got 400 ,000 followers, it like feels like everyone's her best friend because her content is just so candid. It's pics from her holidays. It's photos from her just cooking around the house. And then she's just put black and white text on top. So we'll have like either like your, your black edge so that you can read the text or it will have like a white box with the text in it on top of these images. And I keep experimenting with this. I'm like, oh, but I love my pretty graphics that are all stylized that take me three hours to make in Canva.

27:34And every time I post those instant drop in engagement versus the content where it's just a photo of me with a bit of text and maybe some emojis or some arrows. That is what's performing really well. I've had a couple of posts recently that have had, one of them's got up to 50 ,000 views, which is great for me. That's, you know, more than double my following. And it's literally a photo of me with my glass of wine, pulling like a little bit of a silly face. And it's the kind of photo that I've definitely taken to send to like my partner at work and being like, you know, you're on your way home.

28:07It's Friday. Like I'm opening the wine for us or something like that. And I never like past Ellen five years ago would be like horrified. What are you doing putting that on social media, Ellen? Like you haven't brushed your hair. Like, do you even have makeup on? And it's just so beautiful that that's actually the post that's popped off well. So for me, the strategy at the moment is I do have a bit of a 50-50 split. I try to basically post a carousel, then a reel, then a carousel and just alternate between the two. My advice for other business owners is to try out that structure and then follow your analytics.

28:41So see if carousels really resonate with your audience. You know, maybe your audience is a busy moms and they don't actually listen to reels because, you know, they've got a baby that they're breastfeeding or, you know, toddlers sleeping that they don't want to wake up. So they don't actually watch reels, which is a true story I've heard from my community. And they love a carousel because they can just flick through and read it and don't have to wake up anyone in the house. And, you know, there's certain things like that, that some businesses, their carousels will perform better, whereas other businesses, their reels will perform better.

29:13So it's a little bit of just testing what your audience is going to respond to and then doubling down on that data. If it shows you that reels perform really well, maybe you want to challenge yourself to a bit of a reels sprint and drop carousels for a month, or maybe you want to switch up your ratio. And for every three reels you post, you do one carousel. I still think having like a mix of both is the best way to serve the two different audiences. who prefers Reels and who prefers carousels, because there are Instagram users who are like that. But I also think it's the best way to kind of grow your account.

29:45You can get great exposure through Reels, through suggested posts, through the Explore page, and you can get great exposure through, sorry, did I say Reels or carousels? You can get great exposure through carousels, through the Explore page, and you can get great exposure through Reels, through Trial Reels, and the Reels Explore page. So it's, you know, you've got your options there. Can you kind of share how you are using carousels? Because I think the one thing that maybe a lot of people might be struggling with is if I show a bunch of pictures, what does that have to do with my business? And I understand you said put text over it, but like help everybody understand like what you're actually doing there.

30:21Maybe you could share an example of something you've done recently so they could all of a sudden say, oh, I get it now. You know, because like that's what I'm struggling with right now is like, what kind of pictures would I even use and how would that connect to what I'm doing in my business? Yeah. I mean, maybe it's me coming back from my fashion blogger era where I take a lot of selfies and photos. It's my secret sauce. I have that default setting. Oh, let's take a photo of that. But I do think there's a playfulness you can have, right? Like for you, Mike, you could turn around and take a selfie with your podcast mic and set up because it's a photo of you in situ.

30:52It's you doing your thing. You could have a photo of just your podcasting equipment and maybe you're not in it. And again, quick phone snap. then you could maybe have a drip in a photo there from I don't know a holiday you've been on or a trip or a walk that you've done or you sitting on the porch like you can drip in a few outliers which I personally think keep it a bit interesting if you have a photo that you're kind of like oh where are they like oh that's a nice shot prime example one of my recent carousels I put in a photo of it was a selfie of me and a miniature pony because I was at this cafe on the weekend And it was like a little farm and they had these tiny ponies.

31:28And I was like, this is the cutest thing ever. So I took a selfie with it. I just popped that into a carousel. And now it has the text on it has nothing to do with the pony. It's about business. But it's, again, just a fun little photo to add into the mix. So I think you can get quite creative, but I definitely would mix it in with photos of you doing your job. I've had clients before, like if you have a product based business, like I want to see you packing orders. Like I want to see you like refilling jars of your product or mixing things. If you've got like a physical like skincare brand or something like that.

31:59So in situ doing your thing is really fantastic. And just getting into the habit of capturing those snapshots throughout your day. Because again, we don't actually want you to be super polished. We don't want you to have the professional hair and makeup. We don't want the professional photographer. We don't want that high production shoot. We actually want those authentic moments throughout the day. Are you putting text on top of all these graphics? And if so, are you cropping them square or like, talk to us a little bit about that. Are you just taking vertical selfies? Yeah. Most of my posts you'll see are that four fifth ratio, just because I believe like, if you've got the option to take up more real estate on someone's phone, why not?

32:37Why would I limit myself to a square? And you'll see that I have a very repetitive font that I use, which is just, um, I can't remember the specific font. I do actually make my, even my casual photo carousels. I still make them in Canva just for repurposing purposes. It's really easy to then duplicate the slide and use the same topic and drag and drop in a new photo. But for me, it's just a very simple font, black text with a white background. And you, anyone watching on YouTube or like Mike, you can see clearly I love pink. Like that's my color. Everything I wear is pink. Everything in my business is pink, but I hold myself back.

33:11I'm like, no one wants to see my pink font on top of like a random photo and then they can't read it properly. So I think it's such a small thing, but I do think your font, the readability really matters. And that's where just the simple black text with the white background. And then the other text I use is just with a little bit of an edge around it. So it kind of pops out on the screen or a little bit of shadow. And yeah, it's just that four fifth. It's moving the text around usually to fit with the image. you'll see at the moment I have this kind of pattern with the carousels where I might have a little bit of playfulness on the opening page like I said there's some emojis that I've kind of stuck around or I might like pull myself out of the the image and kind of clear cut it and maybe darken the image behind me so there's like a few little tricks like that but honestly if you've never experimented with carousels like that I'd just get started with a straight image and placing the text so it doesn't like cover your face or just placing it central so it's easy to read and see how you go.

34:09Do you recommend generally just starting to take pictures everywhere you go and then upgrading, uploading the best ones to a folder and you could reuse some of those because you're going to have a different story behind every one of these kinds of things. And do you even recommend possibly doing something creative, like dragging a bunch of pictures into Claude and then telling it what you want and asking Claude to decide, okay, which text should go on, which image and what order and all that kind of stuff. Do you do that kind of stuff ever? yeah yeah definitely again often I have like half an idea and I need Claude to like give me that little little finishing touch or again it's like ah this is what I want to write and now like what kind of photos should I be using I think I love the direction you're going in because for me I don't really love the option of inserting your photos into AI and getting it to generate more I feel like that again you start to lose that authentic touch and I think audiences are getting smart, they can pick up on that kind of stuff.

35:05But I do think if you're stuck with ideas, just again, using AI as your brainstorming buddy is really genius. And yeah, just getting into that habit of taking more photos, taking snapshots. And the really cool thing is you don't have to be a photographer. And, you know, I'm not trying to put photographers out of business. Anyone listening who might be in photography, it's still, you know, something that has value in my business. but it's, it's just means I don't have to do a photo shoot every single month and I don't have to make it into this big production. Uh, some of my students, it's really helpful to be like, Oh, I'm going to just have a content day and I'm going to go about my day as usual.

35:42You know, I'm going to drop the kids off at school. I'm going to go to the gym. I'm going to go to my usual cafe, but while I'm doing all these things, I'm just going to take a photo. And if you even need to put a timer on your phone, a little alarm every 60 minutes, like take a photo, take a photo of what you're doing, that could also be helpful. I love that. And you know, what's cool about that is it's like, this is so much easier than doing video for a lot of people because literally they're just documenting their location and their day when they're at the grocery store, when they're picking up, you know, whatever, right.

36:11When they're just hanging out on their back porch and all this stuff is fodder for, for down the road. And a cool little tip for those of you that do use Claude, there's this thing called Claude co-work, and you can put all of your images inside of a folder like Google Drive and then you can give Claude Cowork has a Chrome extension and you can view it in thumbnail view and then you can tell Claude Code to look through the directory and to find all the relevant pictures that it thinks would be the best photos for this particular thing that you're trying to achieve. And what it'll do is it will actually go through the drive and it will take little snapshots of it.

36:46And if you tell it to, it'll create descriptions of it as well and categorize it for you. And then in the future, you can just tell it what you want. And it will tell you, these are the images that I think we should use. And I mean, it's pretty crazy what you can do with it. And in this case, you're simply using it as a second set of eyeballs, right? You're the creative. You're the one that took all the photographs in the first place. You're just asking it, what do you think about this image? What do you think about this image? And that's where all of a sudden you can get very creative with this.

37:16Okay. And then when we analyze things, when we're doing this analysis, what are we looking for? Because obviously the metrics are going to be different for carousels versus reels, right? I mean, again, a little bit of a moment. This is a topic I feel passionately about, but I really don't look at likes these days. Like when I say analyze a post and see how successful it is, it's not about likes. It's not even always about reach. and a prime example is I was testing trial reels the other day with like a new freebie that I was launching and it was putting up four different variations. Usually I don't do that many, but it was, I mean, I'm not doing 111 like that person, but usually I do two to three.

37:57This time I upped it to four because I was like, yeah, this is a really cool new resource. I'm really excited about this. I want to get it right with my audience. And of those four trial reels that I tested, the one that I ended up choosing to then post to my feed and be like, okay, you're the chosen child, go forth and conquer. I, it was not the one with the most views or the most likes. It was the one with the most comments and the most saves because that is for me, that key metrics that, that something in this, this content has really resonated with my audience. And again, I've been on, on social media for so many years now.

38:28I remember, you know, a hundred likes used to be my average and I had to get every post to a hundred likes or I said, delete it. And this was back in my blogging days where again, I was very, you know, honed in on those metrics and very, if you, you want to call it obsessive. Okay. I was. And now I find it hilarious because I can have a post that might get 80 likes and it could have 200 comments on it of people like triggering the, the mini chat automation because they want the freebie or the link to whatever it is, my digital product is. And it just makes me giggle a little bit. Cause I'm like, likes people aren't liking content anymore, but if they really want something from your post or it really resonated with them, they're going to comment or, or save the post for later.

39:11And sharing is, is that other metric that Instagram has recently come out and said that they're really waiting Instagram shares. If your post is getting shared a lot, that is a really key metric to the algorithm that people are liking the content and they're going to boost it out more. Love it. Okay. So we've spent a lot of time on this content side of things because it's absolutely essential. The rest of this almost doesn't matter if you don't have good content. But what's next? What's the next thing we need to focus on? 100 % being consistent and really making sure that there's a system to support that consistency.

39:45And there's a couple of layers here. Number one, consistency doesn't have to mean posting every single day. As I said, we're business owners, we're actually busy people, we have lives and we have other things to be doing in our business. It's very easy to compare yourself to an influencer who has a million followers and their whole business model is built on content. Like the The more they post, the more views they're going to get, the more views they get, the more like the better sponsorship deals that they have or the more that they have. Oh, that's quite funny. My Claude just popped up. It's doing its morning briefing.

40:16Speaking of how much we love Claude, I'm like, get out of here. It's like, good morning, Ellen. But yeah, for me, that, you know, comparison we can get into with influencers is a funny one. And I have had to manage that mindset myself and remind myself that I do have other responsibilities in my business. A prime example, last month, it was very much a back-end systems month for me. I was building out a new product for my business. And I was working on updating some funnels and really just all of that boring stuff. You know, it was end of financial year in New Zealand. So I'm doing my accounting forms, all that super thrilling stuff that we get to do as business owners.

40:56And I was only posting twice a week. but I was still able to hit all of my revenue goals. The business was still flowing really beautifully. And I still felt that guilt of, oh my gosh, Alan, you should be posting more. And it wasn't until I got to the end of the month and I could see everything was still running smoothly. I could see I was still hitting all my goals that I had to give myself that, that literal evidence in front of my eyes and be like, look, Alan, like you don't have to, you know, you submit to that pressure of posting every single day. And I think we need to remind ourselves that of that as, as business owners.

41:27And the other thing to support that sort of, uh, consistency is, is having good systems. Um, I know it's not the, the juiciest topic, you know, I know everyone clicks on the video cause they're like, yes, I want to know how to grow on Instagram. But the reason you hear people talk about consistency and systems is because it's those foundations that really work. You want to create that environment for you to make better content. Right. And we've talked about, you know, integrating AI and how it can be your collaborator, especially you know if you've had a lot on that week and you're like oh no I haven't done my content you know having that AI collaborator is fantastic but looking at your schedule and maybe blocking out time in your calendar whether it's on a weekly or a monthly basis to be like cool this is when I film or like you Mike you're like cool I get up and I film a video while I'm having my coffee I follow this skincare creator and I love it because she's like oh content is so easy for me because she's like I film a video every day when I do my skincare routine and you know there's that whole beauty of habit stacking, but think about in your, your schedule of your day, where it could work for you personally and how it could be easy.

42:31Because if you, you say you're the type of person who's going to film every day, I know I can put my own hand up and say, that's not me. If I forced myself to do that, I'd be so behind, I'd be so stressed. So for me, I have a kind of like a bi-weekly filming day that I block out and I just, I don't take any meetings and I really just like focus on creating the content. So I'll film a bunch of videos for Instagram and for YouTube, for the podcast. And then I'll capture my photos throughout that day as well. And then I'll have another day when I'm, you know, cozy in my pajamas at home where I'll edit those and I'll make the carousels.

43:03And that's kind of like what my flow works looks like, but it's really important that it's personalized to you and making sure you're planning in advance a little bit as well. Like you've got that content calendar. Maybe you have some content pillars that you rotate through each week to give yourself that structure, whatever it is that you need to set yourself up for success. Love it. What's next? The final layer. So once we've got our content, once we're posting consistently and you've kind of built that muscle up, if you will, that is when we get to amplify with paid ads. And that was kind of like the piece that I feel like I was really scared of for a few years.

43:43And I know it's the same with a lot of creatives and a lot of business owners and marketers. Like, why would we spend money on ads? We could just post stuff. And like that doesn't cost anything. But I do think, especially with the algorithm at the moment, all these changes that we've talked about in this episode, if you really want to maximize your growth, it's using this beautiful intertwined strategy of organic and paid. You know, we're really getting the best of both worlds and it's not about turning our back on organic. It's about actually using paid ads to leverage our organic content. One of my favorite strategies at the moment is actually taking existing content on Instagram and turning that into an ad, which is a function you can choose when you set up an ad campaign in Meta, instead of clicking, you know, like add an image, you can use an existing post, which is really cool because it means my ad money is kind of being fed into my organic content, which means if someone comes across my page organically, they're going to be like, oh, look, this video is performing really well.

44:42And they probably don't know that there's ad spend behind it, helping boost it up more. And I think that combination of the two and realizing that our organic and paid can work together is a really, it sounds so simple, but for us marketers, we're so used to siloing things. You know, you have your ads team, you have your organic team. And I really think we need to come together. If you are working in a larger team or agency, we need to come together and make sure those two teams are working together. Or in the case of a solopreneur like myself, you know, making sure that you're not scared of running ads and that you're not just hiding behind the organic content.

45:17And yes, it is a little bit scary and meta ads can be so intimidating. But again, this is where AI can help you, you know, training up a little clawed skill that knows everything about your business and your ads and your goals, what you want to achieve with goals, any sort of safety measures. Like for me, my little clawed skill knows what my budget caps are. And if our cost per lead starts creeping up too high, it sends me a little kill order. It's like, Alan, we've got to axe this ad creative. It's not working. Get rid of it. It's past your threshold. So there's things like that you can do to make it a slightly safer environment.

45:53But I do think that the key lesson there is it's a lot easier than you think. And we have this fear because meta ads has typically been really overcomplicated. There's a lot of jargon. even myself I take screenshots or use my Chrome extension and Claude I'm like what does this even mean and ironically like a couple of months ago when I was setting up an ad I got this error message and it took Claude three attempts to understand that error message it was like oh it means this and I go and fix that I'm like no still got the error message oh try this nope still got the error message I was like what chance do we have as humans if the AI robot that knows everything has to make three attempts to fix this error message.

46:35So it is a complicated software. And don't let me go too long around how I hate meta for doing that to us business owners. It could be a lot easier. But if you approach it with that mindset of like, okay, I can totally do this. Ellen hates ads and she's doing this by herself and she doesn't have a fancy ads team or anything like that. I can do this myself. And if I get stuck, I can ask AI and I can get that support there. Give us an example of like, how do we take content that's already gotten really great metrics that we care about? And like when we turn it into an ad, does it layer in extra features or functions that do not exist on the original piece of content?

47:13And do you have any tips on like maybe how to set up some ads on some of the stuff that you're trying to do? Mm, 100%. The beauty of ads is obviously you have that direct link. They have that link to click on and it goes straight to your website, your checkout page, your product page, wherever it is you're trying to direct people. We obviously don't have that hyperlink on an organic Instagram post. So that's really powerful. And the other thing that's different is the way that we can target people. Obviously, when we put a post out organically, we're just like, goodbye. I hope you do well. We have no idea who it's really going to, right?

47:47Yeah. You're like, I did everything I could now you're off. And I actually had an issue with a student recently, one of the social media managers that I coach and train where she had a client who they had something like a localized business in Canada and they were getting like the majority of their views were from India. And they're like, we can't sell these people our product. Like why are they getting served our reels and it was just super frustrating. And that again is where you can have that control with, with paid ads. Obviously you've got to pay this money involved, but the fact that you can choose the location, you can choose the demographics, you can get really specific on the people you want to target is actually really, really powerful in marketing.

48:28Uh, so for me, having those two things is, is what really creates the value of an ad and why I've become more interested in ads or, you know, more forcing myself to run more ads in the last sort of 12 months. Previously for context, I had had a agency who ran my ads as well. And that was a very expensive part of my business. And I really just didn't see the ROI at that stage a couple of years ago. And I told myself, I'm just going to do this in-house and bring it in-house. I can do it myself. And it literally took me almost two years to actually do the thing. So I understand that intimidation, but to give you a basic structure to get started, go in and choose something that's performing well organically.

49:12Like it's proven you've tested it organically. You know that this certain reel that you posted or this carousel led to new inquiries. It led to people downloading your freebie or going into a funnel or buying a product. So you know that it works. That's the real key thing because you don't want to put money behind something that you you're like just guessing, right? So put all that content out organically, then pick your, your winners, then put it into like a very simple ad campaign. So my structure is I have the one campaign. Let's say I'm selling like my Instagram strategy playbook. That was a new digital product I launched recently.

49:45And it's the one campaign it's for my Instagram strategy playbook underneath that. I generally just have one ad set and your ad set is where you define your demographics. and this is where again we over complicate it a lot or meta over complicates it a lot bless thank you and i found the best results for my ads in the last 12 months have come from just having an ad set where i choose country uh for me i target females because i mostly work with females and i have an age bracket that's quite broad and i just let meta do its thing so i don't go in there and i'm like interest social media or like they live in this specific town or they they have like like an interest in Squarespace and Xero because those are software that a social media manager might use.

50:27Like I'm not doing any of that. I think that's what we did with ads three years ago. Now the meta AI and its algorithm with paid ads, it's smart enough to figure out who it needs to target. So one campaign, one ad set. And then underneath that, I'll probably have three, maximum four, but ideally three posts, three different versions of creative that I'm going to test. and they'll have variations in terms of like a headline and a caption and all of that kind of stuff. And I'll just let meta do its thing. And I'll slowly watch and see over the course of like a week or two, which ads become the top performers.

51:04And I'll probably reduce it down to just two ads that I'm running for that one campaign. So it really is quite like simple when we look at it like that. We're not trying to create like a million different ad sets with complicated targeting. We're not trying to have 10 different versions of creative because especially if you're working on a smaller budget, you know, unless you're like Coca-Cola spending millions of dollars on ads, like you're probably going to be spreading yourself too thin. Like if your budget is$10 a day and you've got 10 different ad creatives, it's, it's really going to split that up to a dollar per one.

51:37And you're not going to see those results. Dang, this has been solid gold. And I continue to talk to you for at least another hour. Ellen McKenzie, tell everybody where they can discover more about you and follow you on the socials and all that fun stuff. Yeah. Thanks for letting me yap for an hour. This has been amazing and so good to chat about these topics. Obviously you can find me on Instagram at Ellen McKenzie and it is spelt with an E. I know with my Kiwi accent, it sounds like an A, but Ellen McKenzie on Instagram. I also have my podcast Dishing Up Digital, which you can find on YouTube and Apple and Spotify and all of the good podcasting places.

52:14And come say hello if you've got any questions about what we've discussed today. I'd love to hear that. If you're looking to experiment with paid ads or carousels, send me a DM. Fair warning, I probably will send you a two minute voice note back. You can't stop me talking, but yeah. Thank you so much, Ellen, for coming on the show today. Thank you, Mike. Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com slash 731. If you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a listener for a while, would you give us a review on whatever platform you're listening on?

52:46And do let your friends know about this show. You can tag me on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on X, and also now on Instagram. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'll be back with you next week. I'm Michael Stelzner. Do check out our other show, the AI Explored Podcast. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. Catch you next time. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.

53:16Hey, before you go, we just announced our first speakers for Social Media Marketing World 2027. Two dozen practitioners, every single one personally recruited. Every session, pitch free. Go see the lineup and grab your discounted tickets right now at socialmediamarketingworld.info.