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Welcome to Shiny New Clients, the marketing podcast that helps you attract shiny new clients to your business. We'll talk about social media, what makes people buy, how to go viral, and marketing psychology all in 20 minutes or less. Whether you're a coach, a stylist or a wedding planner, if you've got a service based business to sell, this is the show you need to fill your calendar. I'm Jenna Warner, your new marketing coach and this is Shiny New Clients. Do you know who is watching your Instagram stories? Do you know it is your biggest fans and your hottest leads. How cool is that? Instagram stories are not the place to grow your following because 99.9% of the people who see them are the people who already follow you. Not only that, but they're the people who engage most frequently with you. Have you ever noticed that your best friend who you're always dming coming with on Instagram, their story always pops up in front of you. That's not by coincidence. If you're direct messaging with someone, you're more likely to see their Instagram story. The people who are watching your story want to know what's going on in your life. Your main content was not enough for them. They maybe just recently commented on a bunch of your posts and went down the rabbit hole of your content and now they're up there looking at your story. These are the people who love you the most. They're here for the off the cuff content, not the polished, perfect stuff that you put in your feed. These are the people who could very well be ready to buy right now if you say the right thing to them. And if you're like Jenna, all the people watching my my stories are just like my friends and my family. You know what? That's fine too, because those people you just mentioned have a keen interest in your. So if you know that the people watching your stories are your friends and your family, then let's make sure they have the words they need to promote you. Let's make sure they know exactly who you serve, exactly what you do, and exactly what referrals to send your way. I get asked this a lot, so let's clear this up right now. A lot of folks will say to me, well Jenna, reels get the most views for me, so shouldn't I just like put all my eggs in the reels basket? And I really don't think that's in best interest. And I'm going to tell you why stories in general are modeled after Snapchat. I. I missed the Snapchat generation. That was not for me. I, I, I don't really understand how it works. And I was too old for it to be, like, cool for me. Well, I don't know, maybe people older than me use it. But anyway, I do know the premise of it. The premise of Snapchat is like, showing what you're doing right now exactly in this moment, what are you doing? And it's unpolished, it's raw, it's visceral, and it's an incre incredible way to build a connection with people, to nurture the heck out of people, to really, truly earn people's trust. Think about it this way. What would make you believe someone more? Watching a perfectly polished clip of them on TV where it's been edited and their makeup has been professionally done and they're reading off of a teleprompter or watching someone live on a stage right there in front of you who inherently knows their content so well, they're speaking freely and flowing and it doesn't even feel scripted at all. Right? The latter, if you're like me, the latter makes you trust that person more. I can't even tell you how positive a response I get when I post content that's, like, in one take or really grounded, where I'm sort of educating in the manner that I do on this show. Really, because it really shows that, like, I know, I know what I'm talking about because I can speak so confidently about it in a setting where I'm not, like, being highly edited or reading off of a script. Okay, so you can do that too, by showing up in your stories, by showing up off the cuff and showing your face and making eye contact with the camera and being confident and existing naturally in your own environment. It is such a powerful tool to earn people's trust. And when they trust you more, they're more likely to become a client. There are five types of Instagram stories that I think every business owner, especially, like, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, folks who are the face of their own business, need to be posting. So I'm going to get to that in a second. But first, I want to address two mistakes that people are making in their stories so that you do not make these mistakes, my friend. Okay, so the first one is putting too much work work into them, trying too hard in your Instagram stories. Like I said, they're modeled after Snapchat, where teenagers will just snap a picture of literally, like, their hand and send it to their friends as if to say, hello, I'm alive. It's called a streak. They try and do it every day and then you kind of. You like, win the streak. Doesn't matter. None of us are on Snapchat, right? I'm definitely not. Anyway, I'll stop talking about Snapchat. But anyway, they're meant to be off the cuff and not over produced. A lot of people will create stories in like Canva where they're, they're just graphics. And that's fine. Like, if that's what you have the ability to whip up, sure, that's fine. But I know I scroll past that stuff because you know what? I would rather so much more than seeing a perfectly polished graphic from Canva in your stories. I want to see your face. I want to hear you talk to me and feel like we're on FaceTime together and you are my friend. We should do an entire episode on the parasocial relationship and how that works because there are more and more studies being done on it is my understanding. And it's crazy how people will just believe that they're your friend. Like, of course, present company excluded. You are clearly my friend. That's why we're here. Anyway, when you look into the lens and I look at my phone and I feel like you're making eye contact with me, that is so much more powerful than a camera graphic. And as soon as you can overcome the fear of being on camera and recognize that the people looking at you are your biggest fans, these, these stories are going out to the people who already love you the most so you can shed some of that fear. That's such powerful nurture content that's going to move people closer to being comfortable enough with you to work with you. All right? That's the first mistake. Just putting too much work into them and not just letting them be what they are, which is casual and off the cuff. Secondly, this is a huge mistake folks make. We often talk about optimizing our content for engagement, right? You add hashtags, you add trending audio, you do all these things to your reels and your posts to try and get them views. But then folks just forget to optimize your stories. And it's just like any other piece of content. You gotta optimize it if you want to get the most views possible from your followers. And actually, in my last podcast episode, I will link it below in the show notes, but it'd be the one right before this one. I talk about some ways that you can optimize your stories and some tips that you can use to improve viewer Retention to help get the algorithm to show your story to more of your followers. Followers. If you're like a lot of the small business owners I talk to, where you might be getting stuck is just like, what to post. Like, what the heck do I post? What? Okay, Jenna, sure. So I'm supposed to show up, I'm supposed to show my face, I'm supposed to talk, I'm supposed to be off the cuff. But what the heck do I even post on stories? And should it be about my business or should it about be about me? Because if I'm making it about me, then is it, am I even serving my clients and am I a business? And all the I don't know, all these questions sort of come up. Think about it this way. If you have a palette of paint and a blank canvas in front of you, theoretically, that should be freeing, right? You'd be like, oh, the possibilities are endless. The world is my oyster. I have this blank canvas. I can do anything I want with it. But in reality, that is a very stressful situation to find yourself in. When you have the blank canvas in front of you and you could do anything. It's actually incredibly limiting because it is such high stress and the pressure is on to paint the right painting. Right. So what do we do instead? We have frameworks. We have frameworks so you don't just feel like you're going in blind. It's just like when I give my clients caption templates or a content strategy. So you always know what to post. Having a framework for your stories helps you have guidance. Otherwise, it's like, you know, blinking cursor syndrome, right? You could do anything. So you don't know what to do. Which is why I created Strategic Stories, the five Day Instagram Challenge. This is a highly affordable mini course that gives you five days of strategic Stories prompts. Now, if you know me, you know that I am a nerd for marketing psychology. So trust that all of these prompts are actually super strategic. Whether they are helping you get more engagement, improving your viewer retention to trigger the algorithm to show your story to more people, whether it's creating product awareness or using the rule of reciprocity in marketing, or posting sales content. Remember how I mentioned the five types of Instagram stories you need to share in your business? This Instagram Stories challenge reflects all of those things. So not only will you have a framework for what to post for 5 days in your business, but you will be gaining marketing skills and doing so strategically. So you can hop on camera, you can make that content. Connect with your biggest fans and be learning marketing, psychology, and engagement tactics while you do so. One question you can ask yourself right now is, who's stories do you watch? Whose stories do you love? Whose stories on Instagram hold your attention? For me, I love watching my friend Gina. She actually guested on this podcast. She had the episode about having the literal audacity. I love watching Gina's stories because I love her and she's my friend, but she's always out there doing cool things and things that are really unlike my life. And I know sometimes people tell me that their lives are boring, so they didn't have anything to post about, but. But I mean, I think you need to give yourself a little bit more credit on the things that are in your life that are interesting to other people who don't experience them every day. Like, Gina will go golfing. That's not wildly interesting, but I don't go golfing. So I'm really interested to see her out there on the course or in the driving range. One time I posted a Instagram, I think it was like a TikTok or an Instagram reel where I went out into my yard in the middle of winter and shoveled like a foot of snow off of a lawn chair before I sat down in it while I was talking. And that is something that is totally normal to me and really boring to me, shoveling snow. But for my global audience and people all over the world in climates that don't experience that, that's gonna hold their attention, right? So you also wanna give yourself a little bit of credit. Think about that for you, think about whose stories you watch and what they're doing that is holding your attention. I'm not asking you to replicate what they're doing. Just notice what it is about their content that you like and possibly what's holding your attention. Sometimes folks will tell me that when they post, they feel like they're shouting into the void. All right, so say you're not getting a ton of responses from your stories. People don't heart them. They don't message you off of them. Stories are also a really powerful way to get a direct messaging conversation started up. Because when someone responds to your story, it's not like a comment on a post. The story response goes right into your direct messages. And then you have this opportunity to possibly start a sales conversation or at the very least connect with that human. Right? So if you're not experiencing that, it could be that you're not making people feel like you're talking directly to them. Remember that FaceTime comparison that I made? We want people to feel like they are having a direct conversation with you. So that means first and foremost, using the word you, right? Instead of you guys try and use, you think about speaking to one person, not the masses. Make eye contact with the lens instead of looking at your own face, which is also going to help you usually be a little bit more comfortable and not judge yourself so much. Also, if you want to kickstart those comment responses, make it easy for them to respond. One of the days of the challenge, I'm going to have you make your followers vote on something because voting is such an easy way to get a response out of someone because they don't really need to think about it, right? They just need to choose their answer A or B. It's super simple. And if we make people feel like you're speaking directly to them and you make it super easy for them to respond to you, then it's likely you're gonna increase the amount of people that you are nurturing with those stories. Increase the amount of people that get back to you. All right, I am gonna link you to this mini course down in the show notes. You can also get it from my Instagram bio if that's easier for you. And we're buddies over there on Instagram. Enjoy the five day challenge. I'm so excited for you to start showing up more. And meantime, I will see you in the next Shiny New Clients episode.