How Can B2B Brands Actually Win on Instagram?

Jenn Herman (00:02) even if we're talking B2B, you're still dealing with people, right? There's still a person on the other end of that buying decision. You're not selling an organization, you're selling people. And all of those people have opinions and they all have, you know, hobbies and they all have interests and they're all on social media. And Instagram has three billion monthly active users. It's just shy of Facebook numbers at this point. one of the biggest possible platforms to connect with people around the world. Ben Ard (00:55) Welcome back to another episode of content amplified today. I'm joined by Jenn Jenn, welcome to the show. Jenn Herman (01:00) Hi, I'm so excited, it's gonna be fun. Ben Ard (01:02) Jenn, this is going to be exciting. This is a subject that we have actually never covered on the podcast and all the 300 plus episodes. So I'm excited to dive in. think a lot of people are going to find this fascinating, but before we do that, Jenn, let's get to know your background work history. Let's get to know Jenn. So the audience is prepped for the show. Jenn Herman (01:21) Perfect. Well, yes, so I am Jenn Herman. It's Jenn with two N's, because, you know, being an 80s baby, there's five billion Jennifers. So it's always been Jenn with two N's. But I'm Jenn Herman. I've known around the world as Jenn's Trends. That's been my brand name for well over a decade. And I am an Instagram expert. I fell into it by accident. It was something that I fell in love with about 12 years ago. and was blogging about social media at the time and was like, if I'm gonna keep doing this, I'm gonna have to figure out this little Instagram thing. And I fell in love with it as an app. And I fell in love with it for community. I fell in love with it for the photos. I love photography. And it was just a fun thing. And I was like, okay, but it's fun. How do we use this for business? And so I started looking into it and Googling and there was nothing at the time that was anything remotely strategic. And I was like, well, I'll blog about it. And so I fell into this niche of Instagram and started getting invited on to podcasts and speaking at conferences and I've loved it. And now I eat, sleep, breathe all things Instagram. I've become known around the world as one of the leading experts on all things Instagram marketing. But it's definitely something that I, you know, I give credit where credit is due. And I'm very fortunate to have people around the world who, when they get early access to things will text me or message me and be like, have you seen this? Or they'll let me, you know, They'll grab screenshots or let me log into their account and like try things out so that we can play with the new things and talk about them before they kind of hit mainstream. And I've been able to build a business for the last decade on the back of Instagram and teaching Instagram through my membership, through conferences, webinars, events, that sort of thing. And it's just, it's really fun helping businesses get that aha moment when it comes to Instagram marketing, when there are businesses that go, Jenn, Instagram doesn't work for me. And I'm like, challenge accepted. And I've always said every business can use Instagram. It's just, is it right for you? And for some brands, it's not right. ⁓ But it is, I love working with B2B and I love working with industries that are outside the norm, what people think should be successful on Instagram and helping them get that aha moment of like, yes, like, that's how I can do this. But ultimately having them get success to whether build the brand awareness for a new product launch. or to grow the business in a way that they're like, now we're getting these leads that we weren't getting before, or whatever their ultimate goal is. Ben Ard (03:40) I love that. That's so cool. So Jenn, we are going to focus today on B2B brands and Instagram. Now a lot of B2B brands, called it out. I have felt this way in the past. I've worked exclusively with B2B brands. I can honestly say we've never had an Instagram profile. Why was I wrong? Like why should B2B brands actually consider Instagram as a platform? How does it actually work that way? Jenn Herman (04:06) Well, the key is even if we're talking B2B, you're still dealing with people, right? There's still a person on the other end of that buying decision. And Ben, you know this, you've been doing this for a very long time, right? You're not selling an organization, you're selling people. And all of those people have opinions and they all have, you know, hobbies and they all have interests and they're all on social media. And Instagram has three billion monthly active users. It's just shy of Facebook numbers at this point. one of the biggest possible platforms to connect with people around the world. Whether you're talking locally, geographically, know, your small region, whether you're talking, you know, just a national type space, or you're talking internationally, your audience is there. And that's the key to understand is that with 3 billion monthly active users, those people on the other end of those B2B decisions are on Instagram. The question, of course, is how do you connect with them? How do you get to them? but they're there. And if your audience is there, you need to at least consider whether or not you should be there. You can't just write it off and be like, well, it's not for us. Pinterest isn't for us. TikTok isn't for us. LinkedIn isn't for us. Whatever it is, you have to at least give it a shot. that's, know, when you get people on Instagram, which is, like I was saying, like the community building and the opportunity to actually build those relationships, it forges these long-term solutions. that when you wanna build that relationship and that you're ready to go to the IPO or you're ready to start your own company or you go off to another one, you've built that relationship and a lot of those relationships come from social media and obviously Instagram is really good for that. But it's also one of these things where Instagram today is the yellow pages of 20 years ago, right? If you wanna go try a new restaurant, if you wanna go buy a new shirt, shoes, you want to go look up a new company, where's the first place you go besides Google? You're going to go to most people don't go to look at companies on Facebook anymore. LinkedIn, probably for more of the B2B and SaaS and those sort of things. But most companies get searched on Instagram. It's your yellow pages and you have to have a good presence, at least a presence, good is better than none. But if you don't exist on Instagram, it's like, Are they real? Like, is this really a thing? So you kind of, you have to be there for those reasons, assuming it all works out for your brand and the ultimate goals you have. Ben Ard (06:32) Okay. I love that. So I love the 3 billion. I had never heard that before. That's an incredible number. And you're right. B2B, we are still working with individuals. We're not actually working with businesses. We're working with people that work at businesses. okay. Our audience is for sure on Instagram. We're not ignoring that fact anymore for everyone listening. We're all keeping up. Now we're saying, okay, we have to test it to see if our audience wants to engage there. How do we test it? How do we dip our toes in the water? What's the right approach there? Jenn Herman (07:03) So there's gonna be a couple things you wanna think about. And the first thing is ironically something you and Ben and I, we talked about in the green room beforehand, but it's about the value add context, right? So many businesses, I don't care if you're the most, you know, e-commerce based or if you're the most extreme, you know, behind the scenes B2B type brand, all brands wanna talk about themselves. Here's my product. My product is amazing. Have you heard about my product? Have you heard this person talking about my product? Because my product's the best. That doesn't work on social media. It's not marketing media. It's social media. And so the key to success, especially in the B2B space, is that more education resource-based content. How do you solve problems? What can you do to help them? And this can involve your product or service. But, you for example, let's say you are a social media SaaS company, right? And you have a tool that helps people post to social media. Well, just talking about how you post to social media doesn't fix anything, right? But how does that make a difference? Are you making it easier? Are you making it faster? Are you making it more efficient for teams? Like these start to become benefits. But again, if I'm not looking for a solution, I don't really care about what you have to offer, right? So instead it's about like... Okay, if I'm talking to social media managers, what are they struggling with right now? They're struggling with reach. They're struggling with getting engagement on their content. I'm gonna create content that helps them meet that need, right? Here's some tips for better hooks on your reels. Here's some tips for how to get more views on LinkedIn. That's the kind of content that starts to get shared, that gets commented on, that gets posted, and then gets people to your profile. That's what they start to go, ⁓ I didn't realize what this company is. So you have this like awareness content, you're education resource based, and then you're gonna do education resource based on your actual product. So rather than just saying, here's my product, it's an amazing product, you're gonna say, here's how you do this with our product. So let's take PowerPoint for example, right? I follow a number, because I love PowerPoint, I'm a total PowerPoint geek. and I will follow these accounts that are PowerPoint tips, right? And they tell you, they don't say, here's all the great things PowerPoint can do. It says, if you wanna create this effect in PowerPoint, here's the step-by-step tutorial. So now I'm looking at it going, I can try that. So do that with your product. Tell people, here's how you do this. Here's how you set this up. Here's how you create this impact or whatever it is with your product. And now they're going, Well, does our product do that? Well, I'm using a competitor's product and my product doesn't do that, but they're showing me how to do it with theirs. Now you're moving them into the, want to do this. I want to work with this product stage all through education and resource. And this can be very overwhelming. You're like, well, how am going to create? Who's going to create this content for me? Ben Ard (09:52) you Jenn Herman (09:52) It could be influencers, it could be your customers, right? People who are using the product. It could be people on your dev team, although let's face it, sometimes people on the dev team are a little too geeky for what's gonna hit the front-facing content, but you never know, right? So you're, you're gonna find people, may not be you, and you're gonna start to create this content, but you want content that is shareable, the content that somebody's gonna look at it and say, I need to share this with my colleagues. I need to share this with my coworkers, my boss. Ben Ard (10:02) You Yep. Jenn Herman (10:21) I need to share this with my friend who works at another company. I need to share this with my spouse because I talk about this all the time and now they'll know that I'm not the only person who talks about it. know, whatever it is, you want shareable content. And when you do that, that starts to be your proof source that, people do care and this is working. And as you get those views and you get the profile traffic and you get the link and bio clicks and it starts to resonate with the audiences. then you can start to move into the ultimate, know, trying to move to like the lead gen and moving it up. But if you're just getting started and you're like, have to, you know, either start or rejuvenate our Instagram account, it's that value add content that's going to get you there. Ben Ard (10:57) You love that. So now that we know, okay, let's try out the, platform. Let's try out Instagram. Here's the kind of content that people are going to want to engage with. How do we know if it's sticking? Like if it's really where people want to engage with us, if it's time to move on, if it's time to double down and invest more, are there any like metrics or indicators that you start to see where you're like, see, look, it's working or let's stick to a different platform. Maybe anything like that. Jenn Herman (11:23) Yeah, so my favorite thing to look at is always going to be reach. Not likes, but reach. And when I say reach, it's not even views. Like you might get a thousand views on your video, on your reel, but it may only reach 300 people, right? That means everyone saw it three and a half times or whatever kind of thing, right? So you're always going to have more views than you have reach. Reach is always gonna be your baseline indicator. If your average reach right now, or when you get started, if your average reach is, you you're reaching 200 people, 500 people, 5,000 people, whatever it is, you kind of know your baseline, you're looking for content that exceeds that baseline for reach. Meaning it's gotten shares, it's gotten into explore, it's gotten into recommended posts and other things. If your average distribution is a thousand and this one hit 2,500 people, what made that content do well? Why was it different? How do we do more of that. If you have content, your baseline is a thousand, you have content that reached 200, well, what did we do wrong? Right? And it could be timing. It could be the wrong caption. It could be the wrong title. It could be the wrong content altogether. Right? So reach is always going to be your primary indicator, but it's not the only indicator because I'll have content that will reach 40,000 people and it does nothing for my business. Right? Nothing. I'm not going to get a lead out of it. I might get a handful of follows out of it. but that piece of content is not designed to actually drive conversions. And then all the piece of content that reaches 500 people, but I got 30 website clicks out of it, right? Those are leads to my website or DMs where I've said, send me a DM and I'll give you the link for this to sign up or whatever it is. So reach is an overall metric, but really when you get to that later levels, you are looking for... you know, how many website clicks are you getting? How many profile visits are you getting? Are you getting followers out of it as a business metric of success? And then you also want to look at shares and saves. I don't really care about likes and comments. They're, they're nice metrics, but they're not a consistent metric of success. Shares and saves start to give you a value of that content. Saves mean they've saved it as value to themselves. They're going to want to come back and watch it again. Those are your educational resource-based type content. Shares mean not only was it valuable or entertaining to them, but they think somebody else would find value in it. And right now, Instagram is big on shares. That is their key metric that they're pushing. And when Metta says do, we kind of got to do, because they're telling you, we want you to do this. We'll give you better results if you do this. And so they're pushing for those share-based content. They want things that are going to be shared through DMs, stories, and that sort of stuff. So... definitely look at those three things. Reach primarily overall, then your metrics for business conversions, but then also looking at your shares and saves as an indicator of if your content is resonating with your audience. Ben Ard (14:10) I love that. And it's fascinating even on LinkedIn, where I'm sure a lot of our listeners spend a lot of time. LinkedIn really penalizes oddly enough, the shares like those get almost no organic reach or anything like that. So it's fascinating that things are different. Jenn, we are almost out of time. So I have one final question. So we have a big audience on Instagram. We're trying it out. We're doing the right kind of content. We're looking at the right kinds of metrics in that last section. Jenn Herman (14:26) I know! Ben Ard (14:37) You talked about some specific call to actions. Every marketer loves their call to action. You talked about DMS, you talked about profile clicks. talked about links to your website. What are the call to actions that you feel like marketers should focus on when it comes to Instagram? So it's organic. It feels natural. It doesn't feel overly pushy, but really can drive those business results that ultimately we're kind of looking for on the platform. Jenn Herman (15:01) I'm gonna try to keep this short because there's very important things to consider. There's stories, there's reels, and there's feed posts. So your stories are the 24-hour content, they're the bubbles across the top. It lasts for 24 hours and then it disappears. Any brand, any business, any account can put a link sticker on their stories, which means you can send them to any destination. This is highly valuable and stories are some of the highest converting content for most brands. So if you really wanna drive conversions, Play with your Instagram stories. Have a story strategy. Get your link clicks from there, because you can send them to the actual product page, your YouTube video, whatever. You can send them anywhere to any link in the world. So stories are incredibly powerful for those conversions. And you can literally put like a pointy arrow or sparkles around it whatever and be like, click here. When you do that link sticker, make it a call to action. Click here, get it now, save your seat, whatever it is. Don't just put the link, change the text. to some sort of call to action. Reels are the most common content that people are trying to create right now. And those are your videos. Know that most people do not convert from reels. Reels are for awareness primarily. Don't try to get people to convert. They're in a scroll, watch, scroll, watch, scroll, watch. To get them to leave that, go to your link in bio, to leave you a DM. You're asking them to break their focus and it's less likely to happen. So try to avoid using reels for conversions. use them for awareness, entertainment, education, that sort of thing. Your feed posts, which can technically be videos and reels, but more like your photos and your carousels where you can have a nice long caption with a call to action. The standard is gonna be the go to Lincoln bio, right? That's been around for years and years and years. It's the most standard, but it gets kind of boring and most people don't really actually have a good Lincoln bio. ⁓ Which by the way, it should not go to your home page It should go to a dedicated landing page where you want people to be able to find the things you want them to promote but also try things like leave a comment below or you know comment the word link and I'll message you the link or Send me a DM and we'll give you the link or you know, send me a DM and we'll give you the specs You know, whatever it is. Those are really good calls to action that break the link in bio but also generate real engagement on Instagram, right? They're leaving comments and they're having a direct message. And on Instagram, direct messages are gold. It's actually, it's like marrying the person where the moment you have a direct message conversation of back and forth, Instagram promotes you algorithmically for that user in the future. So DMs are a very valuable long-term plan. And if you can get them sending you a DM as part of your call to action conversation, personal interaction and algorithmic advantage. Ben Ard (17:44) Okay. I feel like we could go on for hours. This has been incredible. I have learned so much. mean, I've been on Instagram before, but wow, like this is incredible information. Jenn, I am almost certain there are going to be people listening that really would love to connect with you online. How and where can they find you? Jenn Herman (17:46) I'm not I'm everywhere as jenz, J E N N S trends, T R E N D S on Instagram. It's jenz underscore trends. I'm on LinkedIn as Jenn Herman. my website is jenz trends.com. So go to any of those, you know, resources, feel free to connect with me. Tell me you heard me here on the podcast. I've got a membership that is dedicated for Instagram marketing where we bring in a guest every month. Plus I do training. We're live every week in the membership. and we, we mix up the time so that it meets people in all time zones. So you're never having to be like three, three o'clock in the morning is when we're live kind of thing. So if you want more dedicated resource based help, you can check out profityourprofile.com. Ben Ard (18:37) Perfect. And for everyone listening, will put all of those links in the show notes below, regardless of what platform you're on. Jenn, thank you, thank you, thank you. This has been incredible. Really do appreciate it. Jenn Herman (18:47) Great, I'm so glad.