On this episode of Build Better Brands, Danielle Clarke is joined by Elle Money, an Instagram coach who helps small businesses and entrepreneurs to get the most out of and monetise their Instagram. KEY TAKEAWAYS The reason I even started on Instagram was because I was making content for The Futur and people would reach out and say: “Chris, this is such a good post”, no one knew who I was. Everyone at The Futur was building their personal brand, so I started an Instagram page and tagging myself in The Future’s posts to drive people to my page. If you’re already on Instagram chances are you’ve been focussed on growing that community aspect, which is great because your community values what you have to say and offer rather than feeling like they’re being sold to. But, you need to start trickling that in and getting them to a place where they’re ready to buy. Now you need to ask what they need from you and create the solution to their problem whether that’s a download, a program, a consulting call. Then you need to get them to realise they have that problem. Finally you have to be able to tell them why you’re the solution and why you have that for them. If you’re a content creator you need ‘vanity metrics’ like followers and likes, but if you’re a business owner these don’t matter. People seem to be coming to terms with this, but followers do not equal sales. It looks good to have a bigger following but I was selling on Instagram with 1,500 followers and I wasn’t even selling anything, I had people reaching out to me. I now have a lot of people wanting to work with me but that’s because I promote my offers. It’s not about how many followers you have it’s about how you position yourself. What I found after being a social media manager for year is that you could tell me about your business for weeks and we can do loads of discovery calls to pinpoint it down and still you’d want to word it slightly differently. Why would you pay me to do it for you and still not know how to do it yourself when I can teach you how to do it yourself on Instagram in a way that’s easy enough to manage. Instagram is a small part of what business owners do, even for me it’s only a tenth of what I do a day. I teach people to make it as easy as possible, know what efforts are working and focus on that rather than just do it for them.   BEST MOMENTS ‘I was first hired in 2017 to write clickbait articles and that helped with my copy writing skills.’‘When I started at The Futur its Instagram was at 30,000 followers but it had been left alone because the focus was on YouTube. I asked to take it over as I was doing Facebook ads and in the four years I was there I grew it to over 400,000 followers.’‘Sell the why not the how.’‘You know what you need and what your audience needs, you know what your strengths and weaknesses are, I help reign that in and make it as best as possible on Instagram.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Before joining The Futur, Elle Money studied Fashion Marketing and Branding where she dove headfirst into the intricacies of buyer psychology. This curiosity for what makes people buy led her to tap into Facebook Advertising, and master how to promote products. Elle teaches businesses and entrepreneurs to utilise Instagram as a strong, organic marketing tool to accelerate their business by creating great content in less time that attracts new leads and helps them grow on Instagram. Instagram: @elle.social PODCAST DESCRIPTION The Build Better Brands podcast is to inspire small business owners and help them realise that they don't have to be Nike to have a great brand, and the sooner they start to focus on making it better, the sooner they can improve their lives and the lives of others. On the show I’ll be talking to business owners that have built brands from the ground up. Branding is how you present your best self to your audience consistently. And if they can do it, so can you! AB