Tracy Matthews

Tracy Matthews is the founder of Flourish & Thrive Academy.

She uses Instagram for community building, list building and selling products. She has built a big following over the past two years and use it as a platform to share just about everything they are doing over at her company.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Tracy’s success

Repurposing (with permission) followers’ photos

Result if you follow the steps in Tracy’s session

Nurture posts and pitch for sales on Instagram and get consistency for content creation

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

The most important thing for content creation is to be able to set aside some time to really focus on it.

And so you know, people call it different things like batching time or we call it time blocking over Flourish and Thrive Academy. Other people call it, I think, Amy Porterfield calls it tiger time when she’s working on her creative things.

So everyone’s got their own name for it. But you want to schedule some time to focus on content, you can do that once a week, you can do that once a month. But that’s really the most important thing because the reason why people feel overwhelmed by creating the content and posting on a regular basis is because they’re not prepared.

And being prepared and planning it in advance can often take a lot of that sort of feeling of overwhelm out of the picture. Now to you take the time, you block some time, let’s say to create the content. And then what you do is figure out what you’re working on at the moment.

So for my jewelry business, it’s a little bit different when I’m creating content for that then for Flourish and Thrive Academy, because Flourish and Thrive Academy our marketing calendar is booked out pretty far in advance, we know what we’re going to be promoting and we know what we’re going to be nurturing and we’re always focusing on testing to see what things work and what don’t work.

For my jewelry business, it’s a little bit more a seat of the pants or fly by the seat of the pants. There is some plan involved. Like I said strategy involved, but also, you know, I might be, you know, just featuring products that I’m like actually shipping that day or the progression of a product. So there’s lots of different ways to use it, which I’ll discuss momentarily.

So the first thing you want to do after you create the, you know, time to really sit down and focus on content, think about what you want to be featuring. So, you know, doing this a month at a time or week at a time is usually a good idea. And what you’d want to do is kind of schedule that out in some sort of marketing calendar or plan to make it really easy.

Now, what we sort of teach the designer is that we mentor over at Flourish and Thrive is to, you know, create a spreadsheet of content, you know, we do that for Flourish and Thrive ourselves. I do that sometimes with my jewelry business, but you know, I feel like I’m a little bit more fluid with that one.

But for especially for people who are overwhelmed, I would highly recommend scheduling in advance. And so what we’ve done is we created a Google spreadsheet with tabs for either the month or whatever we’re working on. And then we tab it out. So we, you know, upload the picture there, we’d upload the content, and then any links that we wanted to add, we’d shortlink it.

So from there, like if I needed to go in and review it, because it’s a collaborative process with my team, it’ll be easy to review. And we could go back and forth and work together to make all that happen. And then from there, we decided, we sort of map out what we’re going to do.

So one of the most important things with content creation, especially for b2b businesses, that you’re selling to other people, is you need to create a community around what you’re doing and also create engagement around what you’re doing. And constant pitching is going to totally isolate your audience.

So you want to make sure that you have enough posts that are nurturing posts, have enough posts that are engagement posts or micro.

They’re good. They’ve been called different things like micro blogs or micro commitment posts where you get them like really invested in it where it’s not like It says it’s maybe like a portion of your blog where you can get them to read a little bit more and then take action at the end.

And then you know, Gary Vaynerchuk has some formula that he talks about in Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. We loosely follow it, but they said, he said something like, six nurturer sequences or something like that four to six nurture sequences to one pitch.

So you want to make sure that you’re giving enough you know, of the good stuff out there, fun things that people can engage with, and really start to fall in love with you.

And then you know, every six posts or something, post something that you’re selling, or that you want, or list building thing or something where you’re trying to get them to take an action.