Early June this year, Facebook launched the new Instagram automation function. This is great news for those with at least 10,000 followers on their Instagram accounts. Now, you can easily build yourself a chatbot on the platform for that added touchpoint for your followers and potential clients. Juliet Clark helps us explore this latest update as she sits down with Tracey Matney, a Certified Chatbot Expert and CEO of Victory Points Social. Tracey shares with us how we can set up Instagram automation while discussing its benefits, comparing chat marketing to email marketing, and introducing conversational advertising. She also talks about the differences between intimacy and relevancy, the importance of relationship building, and more. If you want conversations that convert clicks to customers, this episode with Tracey is not to be missed!
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Instagram Automation: Conversations That Convert Clicks To Customers With Tracey Matney
I have a special guest that’s going to talk to us about something relatively new. You guys are going to be excited about it because a lot of you are using Instagram. Before we get started, don’t forget to go over and take the promote profit published quiz, www.PromoteProfitPublishQuiz.com. You may think you’re ready to publish a book but there’s a lot more to it than just writing and publishing it. It’s marketing time and if you don’t mark it in the right ways, you’re not going to get any traction.
Our guest is Tracey Matney. She is a certified chatbot expert and the CEO of Victory Points Social and a women marketing agency helping passionate and influential entrepreneurs create conversations that convert clicks into customers. Through her powerful conversational style, Facebook Ads, plus chatbot system, visionary leaders can increase their influence and revenue all well automating their marketing so that they can be freed up to pursue their dreams. Tracey combines her sixteen years of sales experience with modern technology to create winning results for her clients. As a result, we all find victory. Welcome, Tracey.
Thanks so much for having me.
It’s great to have you. A lot of my book people, when we get ready for the bestseller. I’m used to writing campaigns that are LinkedIn and Facebook compliant. Many of them are having to convert that into Instagram because so many of them are on Instagram. Tell us what’s going on with Instagram. What have you been up to because automation’s a fairly new function, isn’t it?
Yes, in early June of 2021, they announced Instagram automation. I’ve been building chatbots since 2018 on Messenger on Facebook. You can now go build yourself a chatbot on Messenger. If you have at least 10,000 followers or more, you can build your chatbot over on Instagram so that you’re automating some things in the DMs. Pretty soon if you have 1,000 followers or more, you’ll be able to do it as well. They literally rolled this out. It’s super exciting. I’ve been creating these conversations that convert clicks into customers.
I always like to joke about it since the girl scout cookies in the third grade, converting those knocks into customers. I had discovered messenger chatbot funnels in 2018 when I was doing social media. I was working with all these business owners and they’re busy. They don’t have time to respond to every single DM, email, text. There are so many things and customers slip through the cracks. I wanted to find a way to help them automate those conversations but without doing it in a spammy way. I’m sure you’ve seen chatbots that you don’t like. You’ve probably been spammed by one or maybe they’re copy-pasted. That’s lame. It’s annoying. It feels they’ll keep messaging you. I figured out how to make them funny and fun. They have little jokes, good timing and they convert. That’s what’s going on.
I did some social media for a client and somebody was using chatbots. I happen to get one when I was in her account posting. I scrolled back through it and it was some psychic and this woman had over 140 chats inside. It was obnoxious. There was this direct pattern every three days cell and they were coming frequently. I thought this is crazy. I asked my client like, “Why didn’t you ever stop that?” She’s like, “I never got on Facebook.” That whole thing, she didn’t even know it was annoying as heck to read this thing.
When chatbots first came out, a lot of marketers were using them like that. They were using them like blast messages. Think about email marketing for example. Most people would tell you, “You should email your list.” It’s not a bad thing to email your list. It’s a broadcast. One too many emails on your list. Once a week, every day, whatever people say. Bed Bath & Beyond emails me three times a day. I’m like, “Do you want me to come to Bed Bath & Beyond?” I unsubscribed. Three times a day, that’s overkill. I’m sure it’s working for them because they realize now that they’re all emails are going to spam. They’re going in the promotions tab if you have a Gmail Account.
What Facebook and Instagram are trying to do in case you don’t know, Facebook owns Instagram. They also own WhatsApp. They own a lot of these one-to-one chat apps. They are trying to prevent chatbots from turning into email marketing. What happened with email, they barely see your email then you have to email a lot more often. What they’ve done is they’ve limited it to a 24-hour window. It used to be, you could send out a broadcast, whatever you needed to your list. Now, you can’t do that outside the 24-hour window unless you do a paid, a sponsored broadcast and it says sponsored. It comes through as an ad. That’s one way that they’re doing it to make it not so spammy. That psychic lady can’t do that anymore. Messages won’t get sent.
If you think about email marketing, it isn’t working the way it used to. I know from my own, I hardly do any joint ventures with people anymore. My list is for my content and my bestseller lists. That’s it. I think that old paradigm of, “I’m going to give you a piece of my genius and I’m going to email you incessantly and try to sell you things.” I think that’s one reason people aren’t opening them anymore.
Instagram Automation: The problem is people just spam everyone, and they’re not really the right people. You have the wrong people on your list.
Especially people who are in the online space, they’re a lot more privy to what’s going on like, “I get it. I’m going to opt into your lead magnet. You’re going to email it to me.” It’s going to be decent and hopefully, it’s good value. You’re going to sell me something small and you’re going to sell me something medium. You’re doing your thing. We get it but if the content is good, I do read people’s emails. I’m on some email list that I receive an email from them once every 2, 3 days. I read their entire emails because they’re full of good either stories, interesting new articles or they’re keeping me up to date on things. There’s one guy who runs a Facebook Ad Agency. It’s a multimillion-dollar agency in the eCommerce space. It’s because I run ads for eCommerce and for online businesses, I pay attention to that stuff. He’s always up-to-date so I’ll read his long emails and look for them. The problem is people spam everyone and they’re not the right people. You have the wrong people on your list. It feels they’re not working. If your content is good, people will read it. Again, it ties back into the chatbot thing.
We don’t use the chatbot as a replacement for email marketing. It’s a way to start a conversation, to have that intimacy. I like to talk to my clients about the difference between intimacy and relevancy. You have to have both of those things to make a sale. Relevancy is simply, “This person has a problem. I have a solution. My solution will solve your problem.” A lot of marketers get that right. They know how to spell out the pain points and say, “Here’s the benefit of my product. It’s going to solve your pain point.” What they were missing a lot of times is that intimacy. Intimacy is what makes me trust you know that your solution is going to work. One of the ways that my team creates intimacy for our clients with their prospects is through chat marketing whether it’s on Instagram or Facebook Messenger, either way it’s having a one-on-one conversation.
It’s not like, “Here’s a giant, long story paragraph that I want you to read.” I wrote it to 200,000 people on my list. It’s, “Juliet, did you have a question about so and so?” There are 2 or 3 buttons, you get to pick a button and that will lead you down the path. I have one client who teaches people how to have more confidence in sales. It’s like, “You’re interested in more sales. Are you a seasoned salesperson or are you brand new?” That’s a good qualifying question. Find out where they are and it’s like, “You’re new. For new people, here’s what I recommend.” We lead them down a path where it makes more sense so then they’re like, “This person hears me. They understand me. They get me.” Its immediate dopamine hits. It’s like, “I hear you. I see you. I validate who you are. By the way, here’s something that I can do to help you and your journey.” That’s why I call it conversational advertising. It’s not like blasting a message like a TV commercial. It’s inviting them into a conversation and it’s automated. All those busy CEOs don’t have to sit there and go through every DM. Not that they shouldn’t at all. If they have the time or they have someone on their team who can have those personal human conversations by all means do that. What I found is they say they want to have this human connection but they don’t do it. The DM sits in their inbox for a few days and that person moved on.
What you’re saying about relationship building has to be there. Many people are failing in the digital space is because they’ve been led to believe that, “All you have to do is this,” and people will click and buy. If you’ve got a high-ticket item, that’s not happening. Most people hire you not because you do a particular thing but because they resonate with you. They like you. They trust what you’re saying. Most of the time that cannot happen without a conversation. That’s where I think so many people have missed the boat here as they don’t understand. They’re relying on clicks instead of relationships.
Clicks are important. You have to have clicks but then what’s next after that? The days of the 90-minute webinar that goes into a ten-day email sequence that’s supposed to sell you the high-ticket thing, I don’t see that working for my clients anymore. Clients who’ve done well ended up in the Two Comma Club. It’s like the webinar model. It’s not broken. It does work for some but there are many more things you have to do now to get people even to come. If we run ads to a webinar, they opt into that.
What do we do now? It’s like, “Here’s a webinar. Watch that and I’m going to send you the emails.” How do we get people to engage? We use the chatbot for that. Instead of them going straight into the webinar, we give them a chatbot and say, “Did you want to get the workbook for this training so you can have some action-taking tips?” They then click a button on the replay page for the webinar to get the workbook and get it from the chatbot. The chatbot is like, “Did you want to get the workbook? Cool. Click this button.” They get the workbook and it’s like, “Real quick, go run and check your email. It should be there in your email.” We’re getting them to open and click on the emails, which tells the Gmail or whoever the server is that this is this person that I want to get emails from.
The emails are ending up more in the inbox and not in spam. It says, “Go back, watch the webinar and let me know if you have any questions,” then there’s a 90-minute delay. The chatbot pops up and says, “What’d you think? Did you have any questions about the webinar? We like to ask, ‘Did you get the chance to watch all of it, some of it or none of it?’” We can say they watched none of it. It’s like, “What happened? Were you not interested?” That’s fine. Unsubscribe or your kid jumped in your lap, you spilled your coffee, whatever. We make a joke. We can find out because if they watched all of it and they’re still aren’t buying then what’s the reason for that? It’s a way to build a conversational relationship with them. That 24-hour window is open for us to follow up.
If someone says they watched all of it, we say, “What was your biggest takeaway?” A lot of times they’ll write like a paragraph. If someone’s going to click a button, that’s one thing. If you give them an open-ended question after you’ve already had things, they’ll write like a long answer, which is insightful for marketing. You can then say, “This is what I’m hearing from my prospects. I hear that you’re struggling because you don’t know if you have enough money to make this work,” or whatever the objection is. You can cover that in your marketing. We’d like to take those answers, compile them and go, what are we hearing that’s common? Money is a big one. People are like, “I saw it and I like your program but I don’t have the money to buy it.” We point them to some free offers and things like that to continue that relationship building until they’re ready to buy.
For you authors that are reading, she said something so important there about unsubscribe. To get to a big bestseller list, you need a clean list so that when you send out those bestseller blasts, you know how many people on that list are going to buy. I have a good friend who’s now a New York Times bestseller. She has a list of 20,000 people and if you don’t respond to something in 30 days, you’re off the list. She always has a clean list and knows where those people are buying. This would be something where you could use that, get a big clean list and make a USA Today or one of those smaller, big piece seller lists.
I don’t know a lot about the book publishing industry but definitely, you don’t want to have people on your list that are dead weight. If they’re not interested then bye. It’s okay. They get their feelings hurt because they’re like, “Someone unsubscribed or I’m getting 5% people are unsubscribing,” and that’s a pretty high unsubscribe rate. Why are people unsubscribing? Either you’re being too pushy up early on, too salesy, feel spammy or whatever. Maybe the relevancy isn’t there. Your solution isn’t solving what their real problem is or their perceived problem. Maybe you’re solving what their actual underlying problem is but they don’t know that yet. They’re not aware of their real problem.
Instagram Automation: What marketers were missing a lot of times is that intimacy. Intimacy is what makes people trust you, knowing that your solution is going to work.
Let’s take the example of somebody who wants to get more clients. They’re like, “I need more clients.” That’s what they perceive as their problem but their problem is probably, they have money mindset issues, they’re not charging enough or don’t have enough confidence. There are other underlying issues. If you’re selling them on, “You need to do all these things,” and they’re like, “I don’t. I need more clients.” They’re going to be like, “This person doesn’t get me. They’re going to unsubscribe.” I always try to make sure that our messages are relevant to where they are in the journey.
This is such a good point because we encounter this a lot when we use our quiz platform. You got people to those conversations. Have you ever thought about why is your closing rate low? It’s like taking whatever you’re doing and the bots are right in this too in evaluating each level of it. Maybe you’re getting those conversations but you find out you’re not a great closer. That happened to me early on. I got a lot of conversations I wasn’t closing. We had to revamp products, revamp confidence in my closing because if I don’t sound confident, you’re not going to have confidence in me. You can feel that. This is also a good way to evaluate those steps along the way. Are you getting the leads? If they’re not booking appointments, what’s the problem there? Now they book appointments. What’s the conversation ending up at? This is a good stepping stone for that as well.
To bring it back to your original question about Instagram. You can do all of this that we’re talking about either in Messenger or Instagram. Depending on where your followers are, that’s where you should spend more of your time. Looking at your industry. If you’re in the coaching space, if you’re targeting women over 40 they’re not on Instagram nearly as much as they are on Facebook. Thinking about where are they located? If you’re selling to teenagers, they’re definitely not on Facebook, they’re on Instagram just thinking about your audience and where they are. If you get to the point where you can build your bots on both places, you’re having this conversation in both. That’s awesome. Don’t overwhelm yourself with that. Choose one and build it in that one place.
Where can we find more of you? You have a free gift for us, don’t you?
I do. Why don’t you follow me on Instagram? That’s the best place you could find me. My handle is @TraceyMatneyVPS. If you go there, I share tips all the time about chatbots and marketing. I’d love for you to follow me over there. Soon, I am close to hitting that 1,000 followers mark. I’ll be able to have my own Instagram automation. I’ve been building everything out for our clients and I’ve got a test account. Pretty soon you’ll be able to DM me and I’ll have an automated response. My chatbot is on Messenger, her name is Victory. You can go talk to Victory and she will give you the information. I would like to give you a free template for building out your first Messenger bot specifically for Messenger. You go to Go.VictoryPoints.net/freechatbot. I can give you that. There’s free training with it. That way it walks you through step-by-step what to click on when you’re setting up your first basic chatbot.
That is so important. When we set our first one up, I messed it up. I tried to do it myself and I ended up hiring someone. It’s important to watch the training with that.
It’s only twenty minutes. It’s not like one of those big long things you have to stare at your screen. I’m sure we’re all tired of being on Zoom forever. It’s only twenty minutes and you can pause it, go do, come back, finish and customize it. All you have to do is customize it for your brand. You add in your images, your words and your links.
Tracey, thank you so much for sharing this. I’m sure a lot of people don’t even know this exists yet.
They probably don’t. If I want to leave you with one stat, there are 400 million messages sent every single day between consumers and businesses on Instagram. People are DM-ing businesses and you might have a bunch of messages in your request folder. Probably some of those are spam but some of them might be your customers. Make sure that you’re responding to them and having these one-on-one conversations.
Thank you.
Have a good day.
Important Links
- www.PromoteProfitPublishQuiz.com
- Victory Points Social
- Two Comma Club
- @TraceyMatneyVPS
- Go.VictoryPoints.net/freechatbot
About Tracey Matney
Tracey Matney is a Certified Chatbot Expert and the CEO of Victory Points Social, an all-women marketing agency helping passionate and influential entrepreneurs create conversations that convert clicks into customers. Through her powerful conversational-style Facebook ads + Chatbot system, visionary leaders can increase their influence and revenue, all while automating their marketing so they can be freed up to pursue their dreams. Tracey combines her 16 years of sales experience with modern technology to create winning results for her clients. And as a result, we all find Victory.
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