How to start brand social media from scratch in 2026 (full playbook)

Transcript

In this video, we are going to walk through starting social media for a brand from scratch going into 2026 or how to fix and scale one that you already have. I am fired up for this because this is something I get asked about in the comments all the time. Since I work with all kinds of big brands, I am deep in art direction, content strategy. I know a lot of you are just trying to get off the ground or fix something that has gone off the rails and we're going to tap into that in this video. We are going to cover the three content types that you should really be doing that will give you the biggest bang for your buck in terms of return, virality and generating real business value. We are going to cover your posting cadence, what analytics to pay attention to, how content plays into your bigger overall marketing funnel. It is going to be a 7 minute MBA of what they should teach you about business all presented here in context of social. I am actually going to rip through all the common misconceptions that people have about social media, what account types to have, where to start them from so you can just cross all that off. My goal in this video is that you have no excuse not to get started with a plan or fix your existing social media. I am going to have some fun along the way. Let's lock in. To make this even more actionable, we are bringing back the Cut30 free three-day challenge. I have linked it down in the description, but you can make content with us for three days with Zooms where we will feedback it live each day and a curriculum to show you exactly what to do, videos on how to record. That is coming at the end of October. We only do this a couple times a year. If you want to take action from some of this, you can lock in with us below. First to start, who am I to talk to you about this? If you are new here, I want to break a bit of this down. Not only have I built pretty massive social media for myself and for brands I have led, now I actually work with large brands specifically on their creative strategy. I get to see this from a high level and a personal level. I am in the trenches, but also I have now gotten over 2,000 people through Cut30, which is the program I do with Alex from Sweat Equity and Landforce, teaching them how to do social media. We've had hundreds of success stories, and here's why this is important: the people that have succeeded there are all kinds—dentists, doctors, lawyers, people that make baseball slide training tools, home goods. We have frameworks that work no matter what product you are working on. But also we get to see the data. There is 100 people in each Cut30, and we get to see exactly what is working for them every moment, every month. Between all of these things, I feel like I have a pulse on social media that nobody else has, and I love being able to share all of that information right out. But in this video, before we even get to the exciting content side, we are going to talk about the why. I'm going to give you a seven minute MBA and what they should teach you in business school. And in this video, I'm going to zone in on what I think is the best thing you could be doing on social right now. And that is one, a services business. So if you have an agency or you are a freelancer, that could be website design services, that could be roofing, that could be dentistry, whatever it is. If you have a service, this is going to be ultra applicable to you. And that's one of my biggest requests: okay, what if I don't have some amazing looking product and creative direction? So we are tackling that. And the second piece is if you have a product that you can make expert driven. So what do I mean by that? The cheat code right now for branded content that really drives sales and leads is when there is a person or a lens—you can do this with carousels too, and we'll get into that—that delivers expertise around the product category to somebody. That is the content that performs the best right now in this moment in 2025. And I'm going to break down those exact formats: scenario content, breakdowns, rankings, all that. And you could apply this expert approach to services, to retail locations and to physical products. But to do this, you have to take a step back. Everyone's views on social, everyone's success, everyone wants to go viral, but they don't really understand what they want to do with that in their business. We're going to lay that out. So every business follows this marketing master plan. At the top level, you have: how do you have awareness for new customers? You can pay for that awareness with advertising. That's type number one. You can get referrals from your existing customers. That's type number two, word of mouth. Number three, you can go cold and chase those down—cold calling, cold emailing. The last agency that I ran was based entirely off those last two. It was referral and word of mouth, a little bit of content, but the majority was cold calling, cold DMing. It still works. And then the biggest opportunity being organic social, where basically you put time and energy into production, but you get uncapped rewards to how far that can travel on the internet and how long it lasts. And this is one of the first misconceptions I'm going to talk about: people think that short form content in particular is ephemeral. It's done in 24 hours, 48 hours. But now, especially that Instagram has been added to Google search, something I've been talking about with Ashwin and Jordan and the brandfathers a lot is the ripple effects of our content. Right now, you can search a lot of sports marketing terms or specific campaigns, etc. Our content comes up in Google and it keeps getting views three months later, six months later, seasonality too. Every time Canton Fair happens in China, all my Canton Fair content blips right back up. You would be shocked at the long lasting nature of content on short form if it has value, if it's not a skit or something ephemeral in itself. And this is why in this video, we're going to preach no slop, no quick wins—no, I'm going to throw up some jokes to get views. That's not what this is about. It's about business value. You are replacing that layer of advertising, cold calling. So what happens there? That follows a traditional marketing funnel. If you're not aware of the funnel, the top is awareness. You generate attention. Then you go down to nurtures, gives people an affinity for you. How do you make people like you and want to work with you? That's level two. And then level three is actually closing them and converting them. And so for the majority of companies we're going to talk about here, you think that they need to go from social media content to a sale, but that is not how real sales processes work, especially for a service. And also most products—people do not typically go see the content, go to the landing page the first time. So we're going to talk about hard and soft sales and landing traditional marketing funnel. If you're not aware of the funnel, the top is awareness. You generate attention. Then you go down to nurtures, gives people an affinity for you. How do you make people like you and want to work with you? That's level two. And then level three is actually closing them and converting them. And so for the majority of companies we're going to talk about here, you think that they need to go from social media content to a sale, but that is not how real sales processes work, especially for a service. And also most products people do not typically go see the content, go to the landing page by the first time. So we're going to talk about hard and soft sales and landing pages next. So when you begin putting together your social content, you have to think about where are they going to go? What is the call to action? And they're going to end up on a landing page on your website 90% of the time. And that landing page is a website that's designed to take an action. There's two actions they can take. One, buy right there. It's a hard call to action. Number two is get their info, have them become a lead as a soft call to action. Let's go to example one. So if you want people to convert right away, you need to make sure on your landing pages that you have called out the objective they're trying to solve. Are they trying to grow on social media so that they can go on more dates? Are they trying to lose weight to achieve X goal? Are they trying to cut down their runtime, get the most protein and the least amount of calories, whatever that is, calling out their objective there, listing the benefits to the person of what your product has, not just your specs, testimonials and reviews right there on the page, and then frequently asked questions. What objections they have? Can you solve that in the lander? That is the core of what a conversion-based landing page will have on it. But soft CTAs are often much more important, especially for businesses that sell service and also for businesses that require some education to get someone to buy, which is way more businesses than you think. You want to just get someone's email. So for that we have what's called lead magnets. This is when you give somebody something information typically in exchange for their information. So this could be a PDF, like a checklist or a diet plan. It could be a free quote or an estimate. And so for instance, a great example of this is those big reports I do with Van Group. We did our big luxury online report about websites and luxury. That is a lead magnet for them, for people that want to get a luxury website done. And then here's how that exact flow works, right? Thousands of people sign up for those reports. We get five, six thousand people on a report. Only a fraction of those are their end customers, but that's fine. Those customers take, it's a long sales cycle. When you decide you need a website, you actually make the decision to go on it. You build a budget. It's often like a year. So they are just getting those people on their list, then educate them and nurture them over time until they're ready to make that decision. But when they have, they now have read this incredibly immaculate piece of content created with an influencer and people know what they're doing, promoted, that drives a ton of value for them to think about. And they become top of mind for that choice. Now you can have more tactical content that leads to a quicker release. But that is the idea. Get that information, get them on your list, communicate with them regularly. That is typically where you want to go for social media. You want to get people then into the next stage of your funnel, right? Like, okay, we follow you on social. Now they're on your email list. They're on your SMS. They've signed up for a call, whatever. Now, a typical business flow for anything is usually there's a call involved, right? A pitch of some kind. So what happens is they'll sign up as a lead and you want someone to get on a call. And you have what's called pre-call assets. These are really important for every marketer and social media person to understand. Before someone gets on a call or makes a decision, you want to give them as much information as you can. So salespeople can send it over in an email. You can send them an email automation. If it's an e-commerce brand, you can use something like Omnisend or even just a regular SaaS services brand. Send it over. You're basically giving them information before they actually get on a call to make a decision. After they get on the call and you pitch them on a new roof or power car washing or a website, whatever it is, afterwards, you want to give them even more stuff to get them to actually finalize and get to the purchase. And all of that is content. That's why I call this out. Every single one of those stages has content. Content on the landing page, content pre-call, content they show on the call, content after the call. And if there's no call involved and they're just buying, it's just emails that go to them, SMS that goes to them. But every piece of content that you make should be used in all of these places. So even if it only gets a couple thousand views up front, if it's then used in these other places in the funnel because it achieves an objective, that is how content should be thought about for marketing. You should think about a marketing budget and content's a small amount. Now it's like, what is my content plan and where can I use it in marketing? That's the new way to think about this. So having that framework going into this is really important versus just like, I need to put up views and make sales for my business. It's like, no, I need to get people. I need to be able to give them a lead magnet. I need to be able to give them a reason to give me their info. Then I need to be able to educate them enough to actually get them to make a sale. And I do that by repurposing a bunch of this content and thinking about content more holistically. That is the end of the seven minute, roughly MBA. Now let's get to the fun part. Let's get into the content types. There are four types of content you are going to zone in on. Storytelling, rankings and ratings, breakdowns, and scenarios. Those are your four content types and you can do them in two formats: carousels, visual, or in video. And the video could be a talking head. It could be an edited vlog. It could be a green screen, whatever that you want to be. But that means with carousels, especially you don't have to be on camera and on video to do this. You can succeed in social media purely with carousels. You just have to care about the design and the editing of them. But what are these four things? So storytelling is actually telling the story of your business. 64 days ago, I decided to buy a bowling alley. And so you are going through the process of the things that you are doing every day. So a great example of this is Yon Mavic and he literally bought a bowling alley. That's a great visual example for this. Not everyone has that. And Carson, vlog. It could be a green screen, whatever that you want to be. But that means with carousels, especially you don't have to be on camera and on video to do this. You can succeed in social media purely with carousels. You just have to care about the design and the editing of them. But what are these four things? So storytelling is actually telling the story of your business. 64 days ago, I decided to buy a bowling alley. And so you are going through the process of the things that you are doing every day. So a great example of this is Yon Mavic and he literally bought a bowling alley. That's a great visual example for this. Not everyone has that. And Carson, shout out. Carson is a designer for his freelance graphic design business. And for the job he works for, he was able to make content where he's just showing the process. He's telling the story of creating something. That's content type number one. Now, storytelling doesn't always have to be your story. So someone who's done an amazing job with this is Ken from Front Office. And I wouldn't aspire to have his content. His content is amazing. But even if you did a dumbed down version of it, he talks about stuff that he likes and respects that he is learning from to build his clothing brand. So for instance, he's talking about salvage denim, cashmere sweaters. He's talking about hunting jackets. They're not the ones that he makes. He ties in his products sometimes. But also, he just tells the story of these two different hunting jackets, for instance. And this is why expertise-driven content is so important. So if you sell hunting jackets and you still tell the story of other hunting jackets, how could that possibly make sense for your business? Well, it shows your expertise in the content. People want to know about these things, but they don't inherently want to be sold. So his ability to say, I care so much about hunting jackets, I can tell this immaculate history of why they're important or why this material is important, gives him credibility that when he goes and drops denim or drops his own jacket, people are like, wow, I really resonate with how the care and intensity this person puts into their craft. And I pay more attention to it. It is a lower stage in the funnel. And he's used his expertise at the higher stage. And his expertise can be used studying it, right? But for instance, a fragrance brand that educates people on the most interesting fragrances in the world and then releases their own fragrance and tells that story is one of the best ways to get real, actual, credible attention on the internet. And you can do this from the perspective of the student or the perspective of the expert. So Ken positions himself a bit in the middle where he says, Hey, I love clothes to this extent, but I'm a doctor, I don't know a lot about clothes. So I am like a student of the game who's growing into an expert. Now, if you were at the beginning, you're like, Hey, I just discovered these scents, what makes them tick? You're showing your journey through a story. On the other hand, if you are a doctor and you're being like, I know everything about this, and here's exactly how it works, you're able to do it from a really credible standpoint. They both work. But your job of storytelling content is to pick your story or the story of interesting things in your niche. And are you approaching it from a student perspective or an expert perspective and to then make that content and to do that content well. You often want to follow what's called the hero's journey format, this idea that when you make a story, people are compelled to follow it if they have a setup that's interesting, some big conflict that happens, the conflict tries to get solved, it doesn't quite—they try again, they make it. Oh, now they persevere. That is just a common thread. And being able to use that storytelling perspective is a really important thing in story content. But that is definitely the hardest of the options we have here. Next up, we have ratings and rankings. So this is a dentist that was in this last Cut30. This video has hundreds of thousands, I think coming up on a million views. He is a dentist sitting in the dentist chair rating whitening toothpaste on whether you should use it. This is the power of expertise. If you have it again, student perspective or teacher perspective is a crucial thing to bang in your head. This same video may not succeed to the same extent. But if you were not a dentist, you're trying to build credibility in this niche, it would literally be like I bought every one of these toothpaste or I'm researching every toothpaste to determine if it's the one I should use or not. You are building that credibility. Again, if you had your own dental care brand or whatever, you are showing people that you are putting in the work to learn it and you're giving value along the way. But if you have the credibility, which a lot of people inherently do, especially if you have a business and you're a roofer or whatever, giving your opinion and sharing why is crucial and people want to know. And why this is important, there's a bigger sociological thing happening here where the media doesn't educate anymore. You don't read magazines and learn about toothpaste, right? And everything on the internet is so crowded and just these Google SEO results that maybe you learn some stuff from ChatGPT if you ask it, but we just don't get real human information from people in the same way. I go see the dentist. I don't really get a chance to have a 20 minute conversation with them about whitening toothpaste, right? You're in the chair, you get your stuff clean or any questions. All right, you're out. And I'm not going to engage them on a lengthy conversation about the ingredients of whatever it is I'm using. But the access we have via the internet is an amazing thing and gives that same perspective. And this applies to anything. Another Cut30 student, this is an exercise we do inside Cut30. This woman has a bakery in Vermont and she's literally ranking premium ingredients that are used in food and why people are inherently interested in someone who's an expert's opinion. And you'll notice some of the subtle things here. He looked like a dentist in dentist chair looking like a dentist. She's wearing the baker's garb. Stuff like that matters. If you again, you are coming from the expert perspective versus the student perspective, use it, wear the scrubs, look in the outfit, look the part, do it in the kitchen. We'll talk about sets later, but it's a crucial thing to think about. And then this is in a different language. This is out here to go to prove like this is a video that's doing great from four days ago, 1000 plus likes already about golf in whatever country this language is from. Apologies to all my Nordics, but he's just talking to golf misconceptions as a passionate person about that that has a golf business. Same thing. Another Cut30 student talking about roof siding. Again, they're promoting a service of business for roofing by talking about the types of things that they like. perspective, use it, wear the scrubs, look in the outfit, look the part, do it in the kitchen. We'll talk about sets later, but it's a crucial thing to think about. And then this is in a different language. This is out here to prove like this is a video that's doing great from four days ago, 1000 plus likes already about golf in whatever country this language is from. Apologies to all my Nordics, but he's just talking to golf misconceptions as a passionate person about that has a golf business. Same thing. Another Cut30 student talking about roof siding. Again, they're promoting a service of business for roofing by talking about the types of things that they like to use, why they think someone should use it or not with candid opinions. And so the reason this content does so well is it shows real personality, proves your business is real, starts conversation and provides value for people things are already thinking about. And this won't last forever. This period of expertise won't be forever. But for the next nine months, this is your surefire solution to win. A year and a half ago when we were really getting into Cut30 to start this, this didn't work. This has become the zeitgeist over time. And this is the stage we're in. So it's storytelling, we had rankings and ratings. And I will keep banging in their perspective, student perspective, expert perspective. There's no excuse not to be able to do this kind of content. You either know enough or you are learning at the same time. And the next is breakdowns. How do you take things that your target user wants to know, needs to know, or that are happening in the world and talk about them. So back to the Carson example, shout out Carson. If you're watching this video, he's giving great packaging examples to his audience of aspiring graphic designers and of people that would want his design services, both would want to know. And he's just sharing that with a breakdown of why it's good. And I call out this video because this would work if you are a packaging company, if you are a design services company and you can design stuff like this, there are a lot of ways to crack through this breakdown. Josh, another Cut30 grab, he's breaking down advertising for meta ads and he's giving away the playbook. And this is, people are always afraid of this when they do breakdowns. Oh, what if I give people the whole workout? They're not going to hire me as a gym coach. Yeah, they are. I give away literally everything. You could never buy a thing from me, never hire me to consult. And I've given away 99% of the things that I know and do on all of these YouTube videos. But guess what? Most people aren't actually going to go through all the YouTube videos. If they do, they aren't going to do the actions themselves. And if they do amazing, great for them. But the people that are in my demographic of the executives, I want to hire me at a high budget level. They just want me to prove my expertise. They're like, that guy knows what he's doing. He knows what he's talking about. He has a proven system for this. Let's bring him in. And that is the same thing you're doing. Most people don't want to go just replicate all the things you said. They want your proof of expertise to then hire you to do it. And any of the people that then go do it, you're just building advocacy and people that will recommend you and people that are gaining value and affinity for you. Your customer is hiding within that. You are proving to them your expertise. So he walks through literally this entire flow of Facebook ads and how you have to think through all the stages of awareness and what kind of ads you need to design there for them. It's a complete breakdown. He's selling ads as a service. And while some people may find value and roll with it themselves, if you're like, man, I like the way this guy thinks about this. My business needs that. You are becoming a lead. And the last type of breakdown from the need to know or want to know is that what's happening now. So Scott, another Cut30 grad, all he does is naming. He is a brand naming specialist, hard niche. A lot of videos are going to flop in that niche. That's totally okay because the ones they hit are really going to hit. And so he's doing a content about Stiller's new launch. So Ben Stiller's new soda company, the name, other root beer names, talking about his expertise in context of this thing that happened. And if you care about soda, or you care about Ben Stiller, or you care about naming, you're interested in a whole variety of ways. It gives him good top of funnel content. But now we've gone through storytelling. We've gone through ratings and rankings. We've gone through breakdowns. And the last one I'm going to talk about is scenarios, putting yourself in someone's shoes. So Ryan, his plan to save country style and dethrone Tim Hortons. He's talking about a chain that he would redo. And he's a business person who provides consulting services. And he's talking about what he would do to bring back a noted chain. So scenario video scenario videos are amazing. Another great example of this. One of my favorites, my guy, Bobby Maximus, absolute legend. Five exercises to fix 95% of problems after 40. He is zoned in on scenarios for guys after 40 in a bunch of his videos. The best testosterone boosting diet for men over 40. Six exercises that do years of damage. How to get rid of man boobs. He's zoning in on an exact scenario. If you are a guy over 40, that's what makes this an exact scenario, not just in general. And you want to do X thing. Get rid of man boobs. Here's a playbook for interior designers. If you have 700 square feet of space, this is exactly what you can do to make it feel X. Again, it's developing a scenario that your target market might be in scenario building content has the fourth style of content. Now, one thing you may notice about all these content, this is all intellectual content. This is all not the simplest content to write. Guess what? That's what works. If you try to do simple stuff, you're looking for the easiest answer. You're not going to make it on social. But if you're willing to think about it from a student perspective or an expert perspective and attack these angles and actually write useful stuff for people, it's going to be really hard to go wrong. The best part about this content is if you get 600 views on it, you get 600 views. Anyone that actually watched 30 seconds of it got a tremendous amount of value. You are building people that will become real customers out of that. All right. 60 second blitz. We're going to put 60 seconds on the clock. I'm going to walk through all the common questions and misconceptions you have starting an account before we get into a flow. So the first is what network should I do? You should focus on TikTok and Instagram. If you're already active on X and LinkedIn and you're willing to put in some work, I would also cross post there. And you This content is if you get 600 views on it, you get 600 views. Anyone that actually watched 30 seconds of it got a tremendous amount of value. You are building people that will become real customers out of that. All right. 60 second blitz. We're going to put 60 seconds on the clock. I'm going to walk through all the common questions and misconceptions you have starting an account before we get into a flow. So the first is what network should I do? You should focus on TikTok and Instagram. If you're already active on X and LinkedIn and you're willing to put in some work, I would also cross post there. And you can cross post to YouTube shorts, but it's not going to drive a bunch of value, but worth just throwing on there. So why? TikTok and Instagram give you the most value for what you're posting. They give you free views no matter what from view one. You can go viral from video one. You have the biggest total available market for your business on there. Also, the content that does good on one is good enough on the other. You may specialize in one more than the other over time, but at the end of the day, both carousels and videos do great on both of them and you should just roll with that. Post on both. LinkedIn and X, if you are willing to be on there and talking to people and engaging and commenting, that can do well as well. I wouldn't base it on that, but it was a great place to add on if you want to drive more value from things you already created. YouTube shorts is not going to drive much business value for you. Even if you put up a bunch of views, 30,000 views doesn't really do anything for you. Million views maybe does some stuff for you. Maybe not. It's not good viewers. It's again, it's fine to cross post, get the awareness. Do not expect anything for your business from it. You got to go into YouTube shorts with zero expectations. For your type of account, you should always have a creator account on TikTok and on Instagram. You can still run ads on Instagram with a TikTok account. It doesn't affect your ad account. TikTok, the only reason to have a brand account is if you have a TikTok shop store. And even with that, you'll see most people will then have a business account the store is on and a separate creator account that they use to make videos because those brand accounts are de-weighted in the algorithm. Everyone else, creator accounts. Country. Your account should be started in the country that you want to target for TikTok. For Instagram, it should be set to that. It's also ideally set up in that country as well. This is why if you have an account in Singapore and you can't actually reach anybody, because you're trying to reach the US and you wonder why, it's because it's showing it to people in Singapore. Start and get the location set up and post mostly from that country or else it's going to really impact the organic reach you have. If you're traveling naturally, totally fine. The algorithm knows. I know you're a South American traveling in Europe and they're going to show your content and then show you content based on those things. So it's important to consider. Again, it doesn't always have to be that way, but it's really important where you start and build the basis of your account. The US and Canada kind of has a lot of overlap. It's not as important. Same thing with English speaking Europe countries, but it makes a lot of difference for everywhere else in the world. And if you cannot do that, you should hire someone. Hire someone on Upwork to set up the account, use the phone number in the right place, and then maintain and post that content and make sure you have access to it. Maybe a backup person to use in case that goes south. But that is a huge thing of why people wonder why their account doesn't work because they literally have it set up in a country that doesn't matter. If you went and you set up your account in Sri Lanka while you're on vacation, that's actually a problem. And then no schedulers. No, we actually tested this in Cut30 for hundreds of videos and could prove definitively that every single scheduling app, including the ones native to the platforms, hurts the performance. You should be uploading and posting exactly whenever you want to do it. And then people are always asking, can I cross post? Should I do X and Y? Or can I hire someone to post out my other stuff from overseas? No, just post it. Guess what? It takes an average of two to three minutes for every post you're going to do. So if you're posting on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, YouTube shorts, just throw in Snapchat Spotlight for the hell of it. That's going to take you 12 to 15 minutes and you can do it. It's not deep work. You can do it while you're on another call. You can do it while you're walking the dog. Just do it. If you are trying to optimize and that is too much work for you, that's actually a symptom of a bigger problem of you not wanting to do the work. Just cross post. End of my 60 second rant. I hope I made it in time. This week's video is brought to you by Omnisend. They are my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce email. If you are using Shopify, it is a no brainer to use Omnisend. But as always, I want to make sure these placements are full of value. So we are going to talk about founder email, how to use plain text in your email marketing. A common misconception with brands is that all their emails have to be these immaculately designed product promo heavy emails. But one thing that you should absolutely consider, especially as we go into Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holiday season, is what we call the founder emails. This is a plain text email written in the voice of the founder or the CEO or a personality at the brand. It comes from a human, doesn't have a bunch of fancy graphics, if any, and tells a story. And it isn't just a one off. If you need something, you can introduce a sale, explain a product release, tell the story behind an ignored product, celebrate a milestone that the brand is going through or explain a mistake or issue. This is a recurring tool that you should start and use for your brand to have in your email toolkit. And you will note that plain text email asking people for something or explaining something can be a part of the ongoing repertoire you pull out for big moments and also when the brand messes up. I'd also recommend using features like the automations in Omnisend. For instance, your welcome automation when someone first becomes a subscriber or the automation after they make their first purchase where you can introduce them to more about the brand. Throw one of these plain text emails in there so the founder introduces themselves and explains the backstory, etc. So it's something your consumers are used to seeing from the start. Anyway, if you are looking for a strategy to kick off your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or your holiday season, you haven't done that yet, a plain text founder email is an awesome way to do it. pull out for big moments and also when the brand messes up. I'd also recommend using features like the automations in Omnisend. For instance, your welcome automation when someone first becomes a subscriber or the automation after they make their first purchase where you can introduce them to more about the brand. Throw one of these plain text emails in there so the founder introduces themselves and maybe explains the backstory, etc. So it's something your consumers are used to seeing from the start. Anyway, if you are looking for a strategy to kick off your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or your holiday season, you haven't done that yet. A plain text founder email is an awesome way to do it. Walking through some of their favorite picks or some of the stories behind the brand, which I'll have done getting into this holiday season. And I would highly recommend using Omnisend. A, they are significantly more affordable than some of the competition and they have full features from segmentation to automation to analytics for your brand. You can learn more about them at the link in my description. And I do have a full length email marketing video that's also on this channel if you want to really dive in. So now we're going to, what are you actually going to do? You are going to pick two of the things that I put up there. Three if you are ambitious. And what I mean by, and we're going to pick from these charts. You've got video and you've got carousels. So you have storytelling, breakdowns, ratings, scenarios. You can make videos of each of those. You can make carousels of each of those. Choose three. Two is probably for the week, but two is the minimum you choose. Two is two. Choose three if you want of that combo of video and carousels of any of those. It could be all carousels. It could be all videos. It could be a mix. And your job is for those three you picked, two to three you picked, you're going to do two of those every week. That is your four to six posts. You are going to make four to six posts a week. You should post every day. You should post four if you want to really do this and get after this. If you were like, man, I really just don't have the time. Pick four. Do two of two things. And you're going to do each of those for a month before you even evaluate or decide on anything. That is the core of the social strategy to go from scratch. Two of each a week. That's your four to six posts. And you're going to do each of those four times. And then you can actually start to look at some data and make some decisions on getting better. And then you are going to layer on. Some of those are going to start doing well. It may take you a month. It may take you three months. But if you follow that formula, you're going to see some of that content is going to start doing better than others. And you're going to start getting comments and questions. So you can layer on top of that to get to more posts, you're going to attack the common questions and responses. So say you did that ratings and rankings videos on cameras as a cinematographer and people really started asking you about color correction. Then you can take those common questions and say, I'm going to hook my video with that common question and I'm going to answer it. You can layer in more content around that expert driven content. And if you're a student, you're going to go find out the answers to that and come back and present that as what you think and engage in that conversation. And you never stop. All right. So that is your basis. That is your plan for every month for the next three months. And then we're going to get to level two. Once those videos start to hit, once you get some traction, don't even think about a CTA, no CTAs in your videos, no buying my stuff, go to my email list, go to my page until you have traction. If you would do that, you are hurting yourself. You're shooting yourself in the foot. Get traction first. All your videos are getting 5,000 plus views. Then think about CTAs. If you're in a really niche thing, construction SEO, then that can be 2000 views. But then you start thinking about driving to lead magnets. What can I give that has value that they will download? Or is there some sort of advertorial page I can do? You can ask people to go there in the bio or on Instagram. You can use ManyChat or Stan to comment and you can DM people the link. Those both work very well. But the biggest note, the biggest thing I'm going to call out here that no one does that is an absolute driver and the people that do it get way more value than anyone else is you need to engage and DM reactively and proactively. If you are not responding to every comment with a personalized thing, responding to every DM with a personalized thing, and then trying to sell those people who are leaving money on the table. And then if people comment and they seem like legit leads, you DM them. This is a sales process. Social media is a sales tool and it is social. There's a social in social media. So if someone on TikTok is asking a bunch of questions about your service or what you do or whatever, DM them and try to sell them or get them on a call with your sales team or whatever it looks like. But you are going to get so many more sales if you proactively do that and you respond to everybody and you go actually be like, what more information do you need? Hey, you can get this now with this deal. Here's this 10% code. Hey, you want to get on a call and talk about that today? That is what separates people who get a little value out of social from people that get a lot of value out of social. I have had this happen to me multiple times where people who would never hit me up as a client, I'm seeing them commenting on all my stuff and they're CEOs or CMOs of major companies. I am sliding in those DMs. And the same thing works for a business, especially if you're trying to get clients. Get after them. You are now warmly in and it goes down in the DMs. And if you don't want to do it, get your sales team in the DMs and have it be fast. Your goal is to get people from social media on calls with your sales and have them respond as fast as possible or to do that selling yourself or with a team that is on there. Remember that that engagement level and that efficacy is going to make a huge difference in just taking advantage of the content. The biggest thing I can tell you to give you any lessons, if you make one piece of content, you are doing yourself a disservice, not putting it as many places as you can, because you already spent all the time to make it, push it out there. And then if you're then not actually chasing down the leads that come from that, even the soft ones, it's just a comment. Again, you're not making the most out of all the energy you put in. And that might be someone else at your company, or it might be Respond as fast as possible or to do that selling yourself or with a team that is on there. Remember that that engagement level and that efficacy is going to make a huge difference in just taking advantage of the content. The biggest thing I can tell you to give you any lessons, if you make one piece of content, you are doing yourself a disservice, not putting it in as many places as you can, because you already spent all the time to make it, push it out there. And then if you're not actually chasing down the leads that come from that, even the soft ones, it's just a comment. Again, you're not making the most out of all the energy you put in. And that might be someone else at your company, or it might be you, but just chase it down. You'll be shocked how your life will change, how many clients are at your fingertips, even if you're only getting a handful of comments. Last tip, ignore every guru hack. Two second videos. Oh, TikTok has text posts now. Post your TikToks to your stories. Use this audio to go viral. None of this matters. All of this is a distraction. The only thing you should spend time on is making quality content. Go to that list of things above and make the best videos you can in your niche. Everything else is a hack to get views. It does not matter. It's a distraction. It is easy dopamine. You want to build an expert-based business on social media, no matter what it is you sell. You want to have a person front and center. That could be you. It could be a founder. You can batch content if it's someone else in the company. Prep all these ideas and a bunch of the prompts and scripts and go shoot with them once every two weeks is the way most companies do it. Or do it through educating through carousels and faceless videos where you're telling those stories. It'll be a little harder that way. Nothing else is going to drive the efficacy for your business. And the last thing I'm going to think of, if you want, as a bonus, I wasn't even going to put this in there because this video is already going too long, but level up your sets. If you want to stand out from everybody else, you're looking at this, you might be looking at this and being nervous this is already so much. It's going to be overwhelming. Great. Don't think about this. If you have any level of budget, any level of thought, get your set together. What do I mean by set? Like this setup. One of my favorite new followers as a creator is this woman, internet anthropology. She just cares about that setup. She has it probably in her apartment, but there's books. There's a candle. It looks nice. It looks unique. You know, it's her. FZotic. He was in Cut30. He's just doing his set. He has really nice carousels to walk through. First of all, showing that expertise in the same way. I'll probably have to do a whole other carousels video later because I couldn't go as deep as I wanted to into this. He's doing it in front of his fragrances. Same as this DS and Durga founder. He's doing a bunch of these videos in front of the wall of fragrances. It immediately shows credibility. And again, even if you're a student and you're just passionate about this and you put all the ones you've bought so far behind you, you're showing how much you care about it. And if you want to step it up even further, people like open residency, you may have seen me on their podcast on this podcast here. They're just taking a studio format and making it look unique. But that is the one thing I'd say, if you want to level up all these things I said, you want to add a multiplier on that. The set is your multiplier. That's me, the biggest creator topic of 26. Again, that's probably a whole separate video, but sets is the new thing. Everyone's hyper-focused on. But anyway, as a reminder, we are doing the free three-day challenge. If you want to do some of this in the flesh with us as a group for free, that is down in the description. If you have questions about doing this for your own, I will try to hit as many as I can that you drop in the comments, but what to do for your niche. I will note that I've asked this before and you just have to put yourself in these shoes, right? You just have to think intelligently. What can I rate or rank people would care about? What news is relevant to my niche? You have to stop hitting a wall and start reframing and looking at possibility. I had so much more I want to talk about. I didn't want this to be a two hour video, but this is your framework. Those are the exact videos. That is your posting cadence. Those are the types of accounts and the networks that go on. If you are looking at this and thinking, oh, but do I have to do this or do I have to do that? You are the problem. This is not hard and it's not easy, but there is no shortcut. None of the things you're trying to do or you're trying to get out of work. The answer is in the work. The answer is in just doing the thing, not being like, oh, what if I did X or Y? No, just bite the bullet. And I promise you, you will be so happy and abundant on the other side. That is all. If you're looking for a personal or creator version of this, my personal branding video, I'm going to link here. I appreciate y'all so much for watching. Bye. with us for three days with Zooms where we will feedback it live each day and a curriculum to show you exactly what to do, videos on how to record. That is coming at the end of October. We only do this a couple times a year. If you want to take action from some of this, you can lock in with us below. First to start, who am I to talk to you about this? If you are new here, I want to break a bit of this down. Not only have I built pretty massive social media for myself and for brands I have led, now I actually work with large brands specifically on their creative strategy. I get to see this from a high level and a personal level. I am in the trenches, but also I have now gotten over 2,000 people through Cut30, which is the program I do with Alex from Sweat Equity and Landforce, teaching them how to do social media. We've had hundreds of success stories, and here's why this is important, is that the people that have succeeded there are all kinds, dentists, doctors, lawyers, people that make baseball slide training tools, home goods. We have frameworks that work no matter what product you are working on. But also we get to see the data. There is 100 people in each Cut30, and we get to see exactly what is working for them every moment, every month. Between all of these things, I feel like I have a pulse on social media that nobody else has, and I love being able to share all of that information right out. But in this video, before we even get to the exciting content side, we are going to talk about the why. I'm going to give you a seven minute MBA and what they should teach you in business school. And in this video, I'm going to zone in on what I think is the best thing you could be doing on social right now. And that is one, a services business. So if you have an agency or you are a freelancer, that could be website design services, that could be roofing, that could be dentistry, whatever it is. If you have a service, this is going to be ultra applicable to you. And that's one of my biggest requests is, okay, what if I don't have some amazing looking product and creative direction? So we are tackling that. And the second piece is if you have a product that you can make expert driven. So what do I mean by that? The cheat code right now for branded content that really drives sales and leads is when there is a person or a lens, you can do this with carousels too, and we'll get into that, that delivers expertise around the product category to somebody. That is the content that performs the best right now in this moment in 2025. And I'm going to break down those exact formats, scenario content, breakdowns, rankings, all that. And you could apply this expert approach to services, to retail locations and to physical products. But to do this, you have to take a step back. Everyone's views on social, everyone's success, everyone wants to go viral, but they don't really understand what they want to do with that in their business. We're going to lay that out. So every business follows this marketing master plan. At the top level, you have, how do you have awareness for new customers? You can pay for that awareness with advertising. That's type number one. You can get referrals from your existing customers. That's type number two, word of mouth. Number three, you can go cold and chase those down. Cold calling, cold emailing. The last agency that I ran was based entirely off those last two. It was referral and word of mouth, a little bit of content, but the majority was like cold calling, cold DMing. It still works. And then the biggest opportunity being organic social, where basically you put time and energy into production, but you get uncapped rewards to how far that can travel on the internet and how long it lasts. And this is one of the first misconceptions I'm going to talk about is people think that short form content in particular is ephemeral. It's done in 24 hours, 48 hours. But now, especially that Instagram has been added to Google search, something I've been talking about with Ashwin and Jordan and the brandfathers a lot is like the ripple effects of our content. Right now, you can search a lot of sports marketing terms or specific campaigns, etc. Our content comes up in Google and it keeps getting views. Three months later, six months later, seasonality too. Every time Canton Fair happens in China, all my Canton Fair content blips right back up. You would be shocked at the long lasting nature of content on short form if it has value, if it's not a skit or something ephemeral in itself. And this is why in this video, we're going to preach no slop, no quick wins. No, I'm going to throw up some jokes to get views. That's not what this is about. It's about business value. You are replacing that layer of advertising cold calling. So what happens there? That follows a traditional marketing funnel. If you're not aware of the funnel, the top is awareness. You generate attention. Then you go down to nurtures gives people an affinity for you. How do you make people like you and want to work with you? That's level two. And then level three is actually closing them and converting them. And so for the majority of companies we're going to talk about here, you think that they need to go from social media content to a sale, but that is not how real sales processes work, especially for a service. And also most products people do not typically go see the content, go to the landing page by the first time. So we're going to talk about hard and soft sales and landing pages next. So when you begin putting together your social content, you have to think about where are they going to go? What is the call to action? And they're going to end up on a landing page on your website 90% of the time. And that landing page is a website that's designed to take an action. There's two actions they can take one by right there. It's a hard call to action. Number two is get their info, have them become a lead as a soft call to action. Let's go to example one. So if you want people to convert right away, you need to make sure on your landing pages that you have called out the objective they're trying to solve. Are they trying to grow on social media so that they can go on more dates? Are they trying to lose weight to achieve X goal? Are they trying to cut down their runtime, get the most protein and the least amount of calories, whatever that is calling out their objective there, listing the benefits to the person of what your product has, not just your specs, testimonials and reviews right there on the page, and then frequently asked questions. What objections they have? Can you solve that in the lander? That is the core of what a conversion based landing page will have on it. But soft CTAs are often much more important, especially for businesses that sell service and also for businesses that require some education to get someone to buy, which is way more businesses than you think. You want to just get someone's email. So for that we have what's called lead magnets. This is when you give somebody something information typically in exchange for their information. So this could be a PDF, like a checklist or a diet plan. It could be a free quote or an estimate. And so for instance, a great example of this is those big reports I do with Van Group. We did our big luxury online report about websites and luxury. That is a lead magnet for them, for people that want to get a luxury website done. And then here's how that exact flow works, right? Thousands of people sign up for those reports. We get five, six thousand people on a report. Only a fraction of those are their end customers, but that's fine. Those customers take, it's a long sales cycle. When you decide you need a website, you actually make the decision to go on it. You build a budget. It's often like a year. So they are just getting those people on their list, then educate them and nurture them over time until they're ready to make that decision. But when they have, they now have read this incredibly immaculate piece of content created with an influencer and people know what they're doing, promoted, that drives a ton of value for them to think about. And they become top of mind for that choice. Now you can have more tactical content that leads to a quicker release. But that is the idea. Get that information, get them on your list, communicate with them regularly. That is typically where you want to go for social media. You want to get people then into the next stage of your funnel, right? Like, okay, we follow you on social. Now they're on your email list. They're on your SMS. They've signed up for a call, whatever. Now, a typical business flow for anything is usually there's a call involved, right? A pitch of some kind. So what happens is they'll sign up as a lead and you want someone to get on a call. And you have what's called pre-call assets. These are really important for every marketer and social media person to understand. Before someone gets on a call or makes a decision, you want to give them as much information as you can. So salespeople can send it over in an email. You can send them an email automation. If it's an e-commerce brand, you can something like Omnisend or even just a regular band services brand. Send it over. You're basically giving them information before they actually get on a call to make a decision. After they get on the call and you pitch them on a new roof or power car washing or a website, whatever it is, afterwards, you want to give them even more stuff to get them to actually finalize and get to the purchase. And all of that is content. That's why I call this out. Every single one of those stages has content. Content on the landing page, content pre-call, content they show on the call, content after the call. And if there's no call involved and they're just buying, it's just emails that go to them, SMS that goes to them. But every piece of content that you make should be used in all of these places. So even if it only gets a couple thousand views up front, if it's then used these other places in the funnel because it achieves an objective, that is how content should be thought about for marketing. You should think about a marketing budget and content's a small amount. Now it's like, what is my content plan and where can I use it in marketing is the new way to think about this. So having that framework going into this is really important versus just like, I need to put up views and make sales for my business. It's like, no, I need to get people. I need to be able to give them a lead magnet. I need to be able to give them a reason to give me their info. Then I need to be able to educate them enough to actually get them to make a sale. And I do that by repurposing a bunch of this content and thinking about content more holistically. That is the end of the seven minute roughly MBA. Now let's get to the fun part. Let's get into the content types. There are four types of content you are going to zone in on. Storytelling, rankings and ratings, breakdowns, and scenarios. Those are your four content types and you can do them in two formats, carousels, visual, or in video. And the video could be a talking head. It could be an edited vlog. It could be a green screen, whatever that you want to be. But that means with carousels, especially you don't have to be on camera and on video to do this. You can do succeed in social media purely with carousels. You just have to care about the design and the editing of them. But what are these four things? So storytelling is actually telling the story of your business. 64 days ago, I decided to buy a bowling alley. And so you are going through the process of the things that you are doing every day. So a great example of this is this Yon Mavic and he literally bought a bowling alley. That's a great visual example for this. Not everyone has that. And Carson, shout out. Carson is a designer for his freelance graphic design business. And for the job he works for, he was able to make content where he's just showing the process. He's telling the story of creating something. That's content type number one. Now, storytelling doesn't always have to be your story. So someone who's done an amazing job with this is Ken from front office. And I wouldn't aspire to have his content. His content is amazing. But even if you did a dumbed down version of it, he talks about stuff that he likes and respects that he is learning from to build his clothing brand. So for instance, he's talking about salvage denim, cashmere sweaters. He's talking about hunting jackets. They're not the ones that he makes. He ties in his products sometimes. But also, he just tells the story of these two different hunting jackets, for instance. And this is why expertise-driven content is so important. So if you sell hunting jackets and you still tell the story of other hunting jackets, how could that possibly make sense for your business? Well, it shows your expertise in the content. People want to know about these things, but they don't inherently want to be sold. So his ability to say, I care so much about hunting jackets, I can tell this immaculate history of why they're important or why this material is important, gives him credibility that when he goes and drops denim or drops his own jacket, people are like, wow, I really resonate with how the care and intensity this person puts into their craft. And I pay more attention to it. It is a lower stage in the funnel. And he's used his expertise at the higher stage. And his expertise can be used studying it, right? But for instance, like a fragrance brand that educates people on the most interesting fragrances in the world and then releases their own fragrance and tells that story is one of the best ways to get real, actual, credible attention on the internet. And you can do this from the perspective of the student or the perspective of the expert. So Ken positions himself a bit in the middle where he says, Hey, I love clothes to this extent, but I'm a doctor, I don't know a lot about clothes. So I am like a student of the game who's growing into an expert. Now, if you were at the beginning, you're like, Hey, I just discovered these scents, what makes them tick? You're showing your journey through a story. On the other hand, if you are a doctor, and you're being like, I know everything about this, and here's exactly how it works, you're able to do it from a really credible standpoint, they both work. But your job of storytelling content is to pick your story or the story of interesting things in your niche. And are you approaching it from a student perspective or an expert perspective and to then make that content and to do that content. Well, you often want to follow what's called the hero's journey format, this idea that when you make a story, people are compelled to follow it if they have a setup, that's interesting, some big conflict that happens, the conflict tries to get solved, it doesn't quite they try again, they make it Oh, now they persevere, that is just a common thread. And being able to use that storytelling perspective is a really important thing in story content. But that is definitely the hardest of the options we have here. Next up, we have ratings and rankings. So this is a dentist that was in this last cut 30. This video has hundreds of thousands, I think coming up on a million views. He is a dentist sitting in the dentist chair rating whitening toothpaste on whether you should use it. This is the power of expertise. If you have it again, student perspective or teacher perspective as a crucial thing to bang in your head is this same video may not succeed to the same extent. But if you were not a dentist, you're trying to build credibility in this niche, it would literally be like I bought every one of these toothpaste or I'm researching every toothpaste to determine if it's the one I should use or not. You are building that credibility. Again, if you had your own dental care brand or whatever, you are showing people that you are putting in the work to learn it and you're giving value along the way. But if you have the credibility, which a lot of people inherently do, especially if you have a business and you're a roofer or whatever, giving your opinion and sharing why is crucial and people want to know. And why this is important, there's a bigger sociological thing happening here where the media doesn't educate anymore. You don't read magazines and learn about toothpaste, right? And everything on the internet is so crowded and just these like Google SEO results that maybe you learn some stuff from ChatGPT if you ask it, but we just don't get real human information from people in the same way. I go see the dentist. I don't really get a chance to have a 20 minute conversation with them about whitening toothpaste, right? You're in the chair, you get your stuff clean or any questions. All right, you're out. And I'm not going to engage them on a lengthy conversation about the ingredients of whatever it is I'm using. But the access we have via the internet is an amazing thing and gives that same perspective. And this applies to anything. Another Cut30 student, this is an exercise we do inside Cut30. This woman has a bakery in Vermont and she's literally ranking premium ingredients that are used in food and why people are inherently interested in someone who's an expert's opinion. And you'll notice some of the subtle things here. He looked like a dentist in dentist chair looking like a dentist. She's wearing the baker's garb. Stuff like that matters. If you again, you are coming from the expert perspective versus the student perspective, use it, wear the scrubs, look in the outfit, look the part, do it in the kitchen. We'll talk about sets later, but it's a crucial thing to think about. And then this is in a different language. This is out here to go to prove like this is a video that's doing great from four days ago, 1000 plus likes already about golf in whatever country this language is from. Apologies to all my Nordics, but he's just talking to golf misconceptions as a passionate person about that that has a golf business. Same thing. Another Cut30 student talking about roof siding. Again, they're promoting a service of business for roofing by talking about the types of things that they like to use, why they think someone should use it or not with candid opinions. And so the reason this content does so well is it shows real personality, proves your business is real, starts conversation and provides value for people things are already thinking about. And this won't last forever. This period of expertise won't be forever. But for the next nine months, this is your surefire solution to win. A year and a half ago when we were really getting into Cut30 to start this, this didn't work. This has become the zeitgeist over time. And this is the stage we're in. So it's storytelling, we had rankings and ratings. And I will keep banging in their perspective, student perspective, expert perspective. There's no excuse not to be able to do this kind of content. You either know enough or you are learning at the same time. And the next is breakdowns. How do you take things that your target user wants to know, needs to know, or that are happening in the world and talk about them. So back to the Carson example, shout out Carson. If you're watching this video, he's giving great packaging examples to his audience of aspiring graphic designers and of people that would want his design services, both would want to know. And he's just sharing that with a breakdown of why it's good. And I call out this video because this would work if you are a packaging company, if you are a design services company and you can design stuff like this, there are a lot of ways to crack through this breakdown. Josh, another Cut30 grab, he's breaking down advertising for meta ads and he's basically giving away the playbook. And this is, people are always afraid of this when they do breakdowns. Oh, what if I give people the whole workout? They're not going to hire me as a gym coach. Yeah, they are. I give away literally everything. You could never buy a thing from me, never hire me to consult. And I've given away 99% of the things that I know and do on all of these YouTube videos. But guess what? Most people aren't actually going to go through all the YouTube videos. If they do, they aren't going to do the actions themselves. And if they do amazing, great for them. But the people that are in my demographic of the executives, I want to hire me at a high budget level. They just want me to prove my expertise. They're like, that guy knows what he's doing. He knows what he's talking about. He has a proven system for this. Let's bring him in. And that is the same thing you're doing. Most people don't want to go just replicate all the things you said. They want your proof of expertise to then hire you to do it. And any of the people that then go do it, you're just building advocacy and people that will recommend you and people that are gaining value and affinity for you. Your customer is hiding within that. You are proving to them your expertise. So he walks through literally this entire flow of Facebook ads and how you have to think through all the stages of awareness and what kind of ads you need to design there for them. It's a complete breakdown. He's selling ads as a service. And while some people may find value and roll with it themselves, if you're like, man, I like the way this guy thinks about this. My business needs that. You are becoming a lead. And the last type of breakdown from the need to know or want to know is that what's happening now. So Scott, another Cut30 grad, all he does is naming. He is a brand naming specialist, hard niche. A lot of videos are going to flop in that niche. That's totally okay because the ones they hit are really going to hit. And so he's doing a content about Stiller's new launch. So Ben Stiller's new soda company, the name, other root beer names, kind of talking about his expertise in context of this thing that happened. And if you care about soda, or you care about Ben Stiller, or you care about naming, you're interested in a whole variety of ways. It gives him good top of funnel content. But now we've gone through storytelling. We've gone through ratings and rankings. We've gone through breakdowns. And the last one I'm going to talk about is scenarios, putting yourself in someone's shoes. So Ryan, his plan to save country style and dethrone Tim Hortons. He's talking about a chain that he would redo. And he's a business person who provides consulting services. And he's talking about what he would do to bring back a noted chain. So scenario video scenario videos are amazing. Another great example of this. One of my favorites, my guy, Bobby Maximus, absolute legend. Five exercises to fix 95% of problems after 40. He is zoned in on scenarios for guys after 40 in a bunch of his videos. The best testosterone boosting diet for men over 40. Six exercises that do years of damage. How to get rid of man boobs. He's zoning in on an exact scenario. If you are a guy over 40, that's what makes this an exact scenario, not just in general. And you want to do X thing. Get rid of man boobs. Here's a playbook for interior designers. If you have 700 square feet of space, this is exactly what you can do to make it feel X. Again, it's developing a scenario that your target market might be in scenario building content has the fourth style of content. Now, one thing you may notice about all these content, this is all intellectual content. This is all not the simplest content to write. Guess what? That's what works. If you try to do simple stuff, you're looking for the easiest answer. You're not going to make it on social. But if you're willing to think about it from a student perspective or an expert perspective and attack these angles and actually write useful stuff for people, it's going to be really hard to go wrong. The best part about this content is if you get 600 views on it, you get 600 views. Anyone that actually watched 30 seconds of it got a tremendous amount of value. You are building people that will become real customers out of that. All right. 60 second blitz. We're going to put 60 seconds on the clock. I'm going to walk through all the common questions and misconceptions you have starting an account before we get into a flow. So the first is what network should I do? You should focus on TikTok and Instagram. If you're already active on X and LinkedIn and you're willing to put in some work, I would also cross post there. And you can cross post to YouTube shorts, but it's not going to drive a bunch of value, but worth just throwing on there. So why? TikTok and Instagram give you the most value for what you're posting. They give you free views no matter what from view one. You can go viral from video one. You have the biggest total available market for your business on there. Also, the content that does good on one is good enough on the other. You may specialize in one more than the other over time, but at the end of the day, both carousels and videos do great on both of them and you should just roll with that. Post on both. LinkedIn and X, if you are willing to be on there and talking to people and engaging and commenting, that can do well as well. I wouldn't base it on that, but it was a great place to add on if you want to drive more value from things you already created. YouTube shorts is not going to drive much business value for you. Even if you put up a bunch of views, 30,000 views doesn't really do shit for you. Million views maybe does some stuff for you. Maybe is not good viewers. It's again, it's fine to cross post, get the awareness. Do not expect anything for your business from it. You got to go into YouTube shorts with zero expectations. For your type of account, you should always have a creator account on TikTok and on Instagram. You can still run ads on Instagram with a TikTok account. It doesn't affect your ad account. TikTok, the only reason to have a brand account is if you have a TikTok shop store. And even with that, you'll see most people will then have a business account the store is on and a separate creator account that used to make videos because those brand accounts are de-weighted in the algorithm. Everyone else, creator accounts. Country. Your account should be started in the country that you want to target for TikTok. For Instagram, it should be set to that. It's also ideally set up in that country as well. This is why if you have an account in Singapore and you can't actually reach anybody, because you're trying to reach the US and you wonder why, it's because it's showing it to people in Singapore. Start and get the location set up and post mostly from that country or else it's going to really impact the organic reach you have. If you're traveling naturally, totally fine. The algorithm knows. I know you're a South American traveling in Europe and they're going to show your content and then show you content based on those things. So it's important to consider. Again, it doesn't always have to be like that, but it's really important where you start and build the basis of your account. The US and Canada kind of has a lot of overlap. It's not as important. Same thing with English speaking Europe countries, but it makes a lot of difference for basically everywhere else in the world. And if you cannot do that, you should hire someone. Hire someone on Upwork to set up the account, use the phone number in the right place, and then maintain and post that content and make sure you have access to it. Maybe a backup person to use in case that goes south. But that is a huge thing of why people wonder why their account doesn't work because they literally have it set up in a country that doesn't matter. If you go went and you set up your account in Sri Lanka while you're on vacation, that's actually a problem. And then no schedulers. No, we actually tested this in Cut30 for hundreds of videos and could prove definitively that every single scheduling app, including the ones native to the platforms, hurts the performance. You should be uploading and posting exactly whenever you want to do it. And then people are always like, oh, can I cross post? Should I do X and Y? Or like, can I hire someone to post out my other stuff from overseas? No, just post it. Guess what? It takes an average of two to three minutes for every post you're going to do. So if you're posting on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, YouTube shorts, just throw in Snapchat spotlight for the hell of it. That's going to take you 12 to 15 minutes and you can do it. It's not deep work. You can do it while you're on another call. You can do it while you're walking the dog. Just do it. If you are trying to optimize and that is too much work for you, that's actually a symptom of a bigger problem of you not wanting to do the work. Just cross post. End of my 60 second rant. I hope I hope I made it in time. This week's video is brought to you by Omnisend. They are my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce email. If you are using Shopify, it is a no brainer to use Omnisend. But as always, I want to make sure these placements are full of value. So we are going to talk about founder email, how to use plain text in your email marketing. So a common misconception with brands is that all their emails have to be these immaculately designed product promo heavy emails. But one thing that you should absolutely consider, especially as we go into Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holiday season, is what we call the founder emails. This is a plain text email written in the voice of the founder or the CEO or a personality at the brand. It comes from a human, doesn't have a bunch of fancy graphics, if any, and tells a story. And isn't just a one off. If you need something, you can introduce a sale, explain a product release, tell the story behind an ignored product, celebrate a milestone that the brand is going through or explain a mistake or issue. This is a recurring tool that you should start and use for your brand to basically have in your email toolkit. And you will note that plain text email asking people for something or explaining something can be a part of the ongoing repertoire you pull out for big moments and also when the brand messes up. I'd also recommend using features like the automations in Omnisend. For instance, your welcome automation when someone first becomes a subscriber or the automation after they make their first purchase where you kind of can introduce them to more about the brand. Throw one of these plain text emails in there so the founder introduces themselves and maybe explains the backstory, etc. So it's something your consumers are used to seeing from the start. Anyway, if you are looking for a strategy to kick off your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or your holiday season, you haven't done that yet. A plain text founder email is an awesome way to do it. Walking through some of their favorite picks or some of the stories behind the brand, which I'll have done getting into this holiday season. And I would highly recommend using Omnisend. A, they are significantly more affordable than some of the competition and they have full features from segmentation to automation to analytics for your brand. You can learn more about them at the link in my description. And I do have a full length email marketing video that's also on this channel if you want to really dive in. So now we're going to, what are you actually going to do? You are going to pick two of the things that I put up there. Three if you are ambitious. And what I mean by, and we're going to pick from these charts. You've got video and you've got carousels. So you have storytelling, breakdowns, ratings, scenarios. You can make videos of each of those. You can make carousels of each of those. Choose three. Two is probably for the week, but two is the minimum you choose. Two is two. Choose three if you want of that combo of video and carousels of any of those. It could be all carousels. It could be all videos. It could be a mix. And your job is for those three you picked, two to three you picked, you're going to do two of those every week. That is your four to six posts. You are going to make four to six posts a week. You only post every day. You should post four if you want to really do this and get after this. If you were like, man, I really just don't have the time. Pick four. Do two of two things. And you're going to do each of those for a month before you even evaluate or decide on anything. That is the core of the social strategy to go from scratch. Two of each a week. That's your four to six posts. And you're going to do each of those four times. And then you can actually start to look at some data and make some decisions on getting better. And then you are going to layer on. Some of those are going to start doing well. It may take you a month. It may take you three months. But if you follow that formula, you're going to see some of that content is going to start doing better than others. And you're going to start getting comments and questions. So you can layer on top of that to get to more posts, you're going to attack the common questions and responses. So say you did that ratings and rankings videos on cameras as a cinematographer and people really started asking you about color correction. Then you can basically take those common questions and say, I'm going to hook my video with that common question and I'm going to answer it. You can layer in more content around that expert driven content. And if you're a student, you're going to go find out the answers to that and come back and present that as what you think and engage in that conversation. And you never stop. All right. So that is your basis. That is your plan for every month for the next three months. And then we're going to get to level two. Once those videos start to hit, once you get some traction, don't even think about a CTA, no CTAs in your videos, no buying my stuff, go to my email list, go to my page until you have traction. If you would do that, you are hurting yourself. You're shooting yourself in the foot. Get traction first. All your videos are getting 5,000 plus views. Then think about CTAs. If you're in a really niche thing, construction SEO, then that can be like 2000 views. But then you start thinking about driving to lead magnets. What can I give that has value that they will download? Or is there some sort of like advertorial page I can do? You can ask people to go there in the bio or on Instagram. You can use ManyChat or Stan to comment and you can DM people the link. Those both work very well. But the biggest note, the biggest thing I'm going to call out here that no one does that is an absolute driver and the people that do it get way more value as social anyone else is you need to engage and DM reactive and proactively. If you are not responding to every comment with a personalized thing, responding to every DM with a personalized thing, and then trying to sell those people who are leaving money on the table. And then if people comment and they seem like legit leads, you DM them. This is a sales process. Social media is a sales tool and it is social. There's a social in social media. So that if someone on TikTok is asking a bunch of questions about your service or what you do or whatever, DM them and try to sell them or get them on a call with your sales team or whatever it looks like. But you are going to get so many more sales if you proactively do that and you respond to everybody and you go actually be like, what more information do you need? You know, like, Hey, you can get this now with this deal. Here's this 10% code. Hey, you want to get on a call and talk about that today? That is what separates people who get a little value out of social from people that get a lot of value out of social. I have had this happen to me multiple times where people who would never hit me up as a client, I'm seeing them commenting on all my stuff and they're like CEOs or CMOs of major companies. I am sliding in those DMs. And the same thing works for a business, especially if you're trying to get clients, like get after them, you are now warmly in and it goes down in the DMs. And if you don't want to do it, get your sales team in the DMs and have it be fast. Your goal is to get people from social media on calls with your sales and have them respond as fast as possible or to do that selling yourself or with a team that is on there. Remember that that engagement level and that efficacy is going to make a huge difference in just taking advantage of the content. The biggest thing I can tell you to give you any lessons, if you make one piece of content, you are doing yourself a disservice, not putting as many places as you can, because you already spent all the time to make it, push it out there. And then if you're then not actually chasing down the leads that come from that, even the soft ones, it's just a comment. Again, you're not making the most out of all the energy you put in. And that might be someone else at your company, or it might be you, but just chase it down. You'll be shocked how your life will change, how many clients are at your fingertips, even if you're only getting a handful of comments. Last tip, ignore every guru hack. Two second videos. Oh, TikTok has text posts now. Post your TikToks to your stories. Use this audio to go viral. None of this matters. All of this is a distraction. The only thing you should spend time on is making quality content. Go to that list of things above and make the best videos you can in your niche. Everything else is a hack to get views. It does not matter. It's a distraction. It is easy dopamine. You want to build an expert-based business on social media, no matter what it is you sell. You want to have a person front and center. That could be you. It could be a founder. You can batch content if it's someone else in the company. Prep all these ideas and a bunch of the prompts and scripts and go shoot with them once every two weeks is the way most companies do it. Or do it through educating through carousels and kind of faceless videos where you're telling those stories. It'll be a little harder that way. Nothing else is going to drive the efficacy for your business. And the last thing I'm going to think of, if you want to, basically a bonus, I wasn't even going to put this in there because this video is already going too long, but level up your sets. If you want to stand out from everybody else, you're looking at this, you might be looking at this and being like, this is already so much. It's going to be overwhelming. Great. Don't think about this. If you have any level of budget, any level of thought, get your set together. What do I mean by set? Like this setup. One of my favorite new followers as a creator is this woman, internet anthropology. She just cares about that setup. She has it probably in her apartment, but there's books. There's a candle. It looks nice. It looks unique. You know, it's her. FZotic. He was in Cut30. He's just, he's doing his set. He has really nice carousels to walk through. First of all, showing that expertise in the same way. I'll probably have to do a whole other carousels video later because I couldn't go as deep as I wanted to into this. He's doing it in front of his fragrances. Same as this DS and Durga founder. He's doing a bunch of these videos in front of the wall of fragrances. It immediately shows credibility. And again, even if you're a student and you're just passionate about this and you put all the ones you've bought so far behind you, you're showing how much you care about it. And if you want to step it up even further, people like open residency, you may have seen me on their podcast on this podcast here. They're just taking a studio format and making it look unique. But that is the one thing I'd say, if you want to go level up all these things, I said, you want to add a multiplier on that. The set is your multiplier. That's me, the biggest creator topic of 26. Again, that's probably a whole separate video, but like sets is the new thing. Everyone's hyper-focused on. But anyway, as a reminder, we are doing the free three-day challenge. If you want to do some of this in the flesh with us as a group for free, that is down in the description. If you have questions about doing this for your own, I will try to hit as many as I can that you drop in the comments, but what to do for your niche. I will note that I've asked this before and you just got to put yourself in these shoes, right? You just have to think intelligently. What can I rate or rank people would care about? What news is relevant to my niche? You have to stop hitting a wall and start reframing and looking at possibility. I had so much more I want to talk about. I didn't want this to be a two hour video, but this is your framework. Those are the exact videos. That is your posting cadence. Those are the types of accounts and the networks that go on. If you are looking at this and be like, oh, but do I have to do this or do I have to do that? You are the problem. This is not hard and it's not easy, but there is no shortcut. None of the thing you're trying to do or you're trying to get out of her work. The answer is in the work. The answer is in just doing the thing, not being like, oh, what if I did X or Y? No, just bite the bullet. And I promise you, you will be so happy and abundant on the other side. That is all. If you're looking for a personal or creator version of this, my personal branding video, I'm going to link here. I appreciate y'all so much for watching. Bye.